Hello!

We have entered the homestretch of this campaign as we have entered into the final 24 hours!

For anyone still on the fence, now is your last chance to hop over it and join the rest of us :) 

As a little treat for this momentous occasion we wanted to share a few clips that almost made our trailer, but can now provide you all with some lovely, behind-the-scenes info! Click the images below to see the outtakes, enjoy:

Hi everyone!

We are so pleased to let you all know that Hare to the Throne will become a reality! Thank you so much for your support♥️

In the final hours of the campaign we even managed to get past the 3k mark and unlock 'Premium Card Stock' for all physical pledges! We are really happy with that final push and it will be awesome to have the high quality cards in everyone's hands 😁

With Hare to the Throne funded we'll be working hard behind the scenes to bring the game to life. We'll be sure to update you whenever we have something cool to show!

Thanks again from all of us! 

-Lotta, Jori and Ernst

With the production of the game now funded, we thought it'd be fun to take you on a trip down memory lane and tell the story of how it came to exist. Please enjoy the Making of Hare to the Throne.

Hare to the Throne began with a party favor I'd received: a deck of playing cards, which I had brought with me to work. A lunch table conversation sparked between Jori and our good friend Gijs about the fun they've had playing trick-taking card games on hikes and family events. I remember saying, “Those games are nice and all but I wish I could play a trading card game with these playing cards. I wish I could make them fight.” I remember Jori saying, “Go make them!”.

Soon after, Jori and I began prototyping this game idea together, using that same deck of cards. Prototypes didn’t survive for more than a day as our goals were pretty clear. We wanted the game to really feel like you're playing a trading card game, where you get a hand of random cards and need to decide how to best use them. Bluffing, combat, and combos should be part of it but most of all: it should be fun to throw cards on the table! Our second goal was to keep the game approachable: a small number of cards, few things to track, and simple rules that had to be easy to grasp for anyone. If a game concept didn’t meet those goals, we disregarded it and moved on, learning a bit more about what the game needed each time. Being video game designers by trade, the process of designing a paper game was freeing. Usually we have to wait days, weeks or months before our mechanics are in the game and we can see if they work as intended. Now, we could do it in minutes!

One day on my commute, I devised a set of rules I really wanted to test. It was a combination of mine and Jori’s previous rejected versions, but it ended up forming the basis of what would become Hare to the Throne. The goal of the game was to take out all three of your opponent’s Guards by attacking them with your Soldiers. Any card can be played as either a Soldier to attack and block with, or as a Manoeuvre to perform a special effect immediately, or as an Ambush to disrupt your opponent’s plays. Soldiers are played into Formations which fight as one. When Formations fight, the one with the lowest Power is Taken Out and sent to the Discard Pile. 

However, we couldn’t test this new ruleset because it required a second deck of playing cards. So during our lunch break, on to the toy store it was! On the walk there, Jori told me the card effects he’d dreamed up for this version (most of which are actually still in the game). Once we got the deck, we decided to still our hunger for playtesting and food at the same time at a burger place. We knew we were onto something when Gijs asked to play a second match on his own accord. It was the first time any of our testers had asked! From a hurricane of prototypes, the skeleton of our game had self-assembled in a single day. 

Making a paper prototype is quick, but doing a lot of iterations was cumbersome. There is no text on playing cards of course, so we had to remember the rules for each one which led to a bunch of misunderstandings. Paper prototypes also require all players to be in the same space, which severely limited our testing time. Now that we had a concept we had confidence in, we decided to recreate the game virtually on playingcards.io.

With faster iteration times and no limit on the free time we could invest, we started rapidly refining our game design. As it turns out, the fact that all the numeral cards had the same removal effects caused some issues. Playtesters were just continuously destroying each other's cards, and the first player who managed to keep their cards alive would ride that small advantage to victory. We addressed this by giving all the numbered cards their own unique effects as well. The big range of Power values was also causing issues. It affected your chances of winning far too much if you happened to be drawing tens or twos. We ended up utilizing a smaller range of numbers in the fibonacci sequence: 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, making it so any Soldier’s Power could be matched by combining two weaker ones. 

With the rules in a good place and the idea of using a deck of playing cards long since abandoned, we decided to turn our game into a “real” card game. We now needed an artist.

Hare to the Throne only really became Hare to the Throne once Lotta joined the project as the artist. It was due to her involvement that we themed the game around critters. Early on, she created this sketch of Rambert:

Lotta was in charge of translating a deck of playing cards into original artwork. She had the idea of turning clubs and spades into nocturnal (“nighttime”) animals, and hearts and diamonds into diurnal (“daytime”) ones. This turned out to be the missing ingredient that brought the game together! 

In previous versions, every card could be played either face-up or face-down as a Soldier or for its effect, becoming a Manoeuvre of an Ambush respectively. This led to difficult choices for players, as every card could be played in many different ways that had to be considered individually. That problem disappeared if we made it so only diurnal animals could be played face-up and nocturnal animals face-down. A third class was created for face cards (jack, king, queen): crepuscular (“twilight”) animals who could still do both. By simply reflecting Lotta’s idea in the game mechanics, our game became more readable, flavorful, and easier to understand. 

It was during the same period that Jori created his first version of our card layout:

The medieval theming and symbols for the different classes added a lot of flavor to the game, whereas the large amount of space reserved for card name, text and power helped keep everything readable. 

At the same time that Lotta and Jori were making huge contributions to the visual side of things, I was playtesting the game a lot and working on a manual. Some card effects were too strong, others not impactful enough. Often, games would end in stalemate situations. During a playtest, PunchButton Studios’ cofounder Joey Kroon helped us solve these issues by introducing the idea of effects that return cards to the hand. Hare to the Throne was becoming stronger by the day! Maybe it was time to finally show it to the wide world…

The Dutch board game convention Spellenspektakel was the project’s first real deadline, and it was a tight one to boot. We really wanted to show off our game to boardgamers to see how they’d like it. Before the game could be considered presentable however, there was a lot of work to do. If you have to do everything in your free time, even a couple of months is a short time to prepare.

Lotta had the hardest job, needing to create artwork for fourteen unique cards so we could have a complete deck. Before she could even get started, though, we had to all agree on what the cards would be called. Up until now, we had simply been referring to cards by their old playing card name. We had to create promotional material as well and really hone our elevator pitch and manual to make them as approachable as possible. Natasja van Gestel joined the project as a graphic designer, tightening up the card layout and creating the game’s logo and first playmat!

Spellenspektakel itself was a fun and hectic experience. We’re incredibly thankful to everyone who came to visit our booth to play our game. It’s thanks to their feedback that Hare to the Throne took its current shape. If there is one thing that helps you identify unnecessary complexity in your game, it would be playtesting it with a tired convention-goer that has already had five different games explained to them today.

Inspired by the experience, we went to make some surgical cuts in the game design that made it healthier as a whole. Jori’s got me to agree to reducing the maximum number of formations from three to two which made the game a lot more fun and forgiving. We also simplified the rules around combat, using Manoeuvres (now called Orders) and Ambushes. It’s been quite a journey, which you can clearly tell from this picture that shows the evolution from numeral 3 (Februari 2025) to the Tracker (May 2026):

Thanks to our backers, we can make Hare to Throne a real game people can play. There’s no telling how much it’ll evolve from here, but a huge thank you to everyone who’s been a part of the journey so far!

-Ernst de Bruijn, game designer (1/2) on Hare to the Throne

Hello everyone!

We have had a busy but amazing week, and we are super happy to see us march forward to the next stretch goal. We already alluded to it in our previous post, but now its finally here, a show match between Ernst and Jori! Watch below as our two designers duke it out to see who is going to take the crown in a few games filled with clever tricks and cool interactions!

Does this match get you ready to dive in yourself? You can grab our free demo for Table Top Simulator right here! We also have a How To video on the Backerkit page to get you quickstarted and a link to our comprehensive rules. 

Happy playing and let us know how it went!

We are beyond speechless! Thanks so much to everyone involved, for helping us, for supporting us, and for believing in us <3

As a small token of our appreciation and to celebrate this momentous occasion, we want to give each physical reward a free sticker, featuring the sly 'Sonya the Spy' extending our thanks to all of you. This sticker will automatically be added to any existing or new physical pledge.

In the meantime, we have a lot of awesome things planned for the coming days: Jori and Ernst will post a video where they play a Best-of-3, no doubt while talking some design and showing off some interesting interactions between cards! We also have a little behind-the-scenes post planned, to show the various stages of development the game has gone through.

Thanks again so much to everyone!
much love,

the Hare to the Throne team
Ernst, Lotta, and Jori