Barbabianca avoided people and lived in the margins, beyond our circle of stone houses. And yet his bones were the bones of the village. Maybe his furrowed brow wasn’t enough to crown him King in our little deck, but it certainly made him the Fool. Everyone remembers him.

Barbabianca is a collaborative storytelling game for 3-4 players about treacherous memories and poisoned words. About how hard times and easy answers can destroy a community.

Taking inspiration from Italian anti-fascist authors like Italo Calvino and Cesare Pavese, and Neorealist film directors Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, its story is set in the deep Italian countryside at the turn of the Twentieth century. In a town of stone houses, a likely place, but a fictional one. A quiet place where secrets slumber. A place where years turn into decades, decades turn into centuries, and nothing ever seems to change. At least on the surface.

Inspired by Richard Lacey's Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne and taking a cue from the box-set format of Our Queen Crumbles, Barbabianca is a roleplaying game that requires no preparation. Its mechanics are bespoke and self-contained, weaving map-making, storytelling and roleplay into a harrowing tale about community and shame.
 
The game begins by choosing Roles from a selection of notable villagers such as the mayor, innkeeper or local brigand. As you build your characters, you also construct the village around them by drawing out key buildings onto a laminated map, answering questions about the general feelings of the villagefolk, and tracing an intricate web of relationships. 

After this, you follow the Story act by act, taking turns to read out one of the Events that will shake the village to its bones. Every Event changes the very mechanics of the game, allowing players to mix up the narration with Tales of village life, Memories of old Barbabianca, Rumours that will be shared or twisted by the community, and shameful Secrets threatening to upset the characters' life.

As the tangle of gossip and memories grows more intricate, the Story comes to a dramatic climax when a sudden earthquake brings to light a long-buried scandal. Regardless of his secretly-determined guilt or innocence, Barbabianca could become the sacrificial lamb for all the town's sins. Players have a choice to spare him from mob justice—by letting their own secrets be revealed, their own lives be ruined. Refusing to confess means burning your secrets to ash along with the truth about Barbabianca in an ending ritual mirroring the burning of his beard by the village mob.

Cristian first wrote Barbabianca in 2021 for an Italian-run Self-production jam. Around the same time, Indie Groundbreaker Award-winning game design lab NessunDove had been experimenting with a new format for zero-prep games: the Italian edition of Our Queen Crumbles came as a boxed set containing laminated sheets that can be used and reused across multiple playthroughs.

When we met, it was only natural to combine the two. And after 196 international backers got to experience the format with the Hallowed Edition of Our Queen Crumbles, we want to bring the same accessibility to an Italian-made project.  

This campaign will fund the production of a complete boxed edition of Barbabianca in English and Italian, with about 30 reusable laminated sheets (depending on campaign achievements!) containing the rules of the game and every handout you need to play. Write on the sheets with any water-based marker to confess your darkest secrets and seal the fate of Barbabianca, then erase the remains of your game and try to forget about it. If you can.

This boxed edition of Barbabianca will include:

This is a project close to our hearts, and we are almost ready to make it real. The art is almost done, the game has already been written, playtested, translated and laid out; if everything goes well, we plan to go into print next month and deliver by May 2026.

The campaign will fund additional character art, printing and production. True to the spirit of Zine Month, we assemble each box set by hand. You can watch our translator Chiara work on Our Queen Crumbles in the video below, if you're curious about the process.

Barbabianca is a slice-of-life game, at least in the beginning. That means every detail matters. To make the Village feel familiar and suffocating, comforting and terrifying, yours to the last brick. Barbabianca will never be the only target of the town's judgment, nor will he be the sole protagonist of its collective imagination.

A random table at the start of the game will help you make up the name of a typical Italian village, but its soul is something you'll need to draw from your memories (or fantasies) of rural life. Even the Map is incomplete, with only a smattering of stone houses and Barbabianca's shack, right at the margins of the village. How will you fill in the blanks?

The players' Roles are all introduced by a song and defined by a series of questions you'll need to answer. Some help you come up with character Ideas (how does the Innkeeper feel, serving others all day long?), others paint a picture of the Villagefolk (none better than the Curate to know what his flock truly believes).

For each Tale in Barbabianca's story, you can draw inspiration from the suggested Happenings for each Role, or explore a Rumour that's going around, or just follow on the events of previous Tales. Barbabianca is designed to give you space to build up your Village as a group, without ever feeling lost.

This campaign is special to us. After spending so many years working on international projects, we're back to sharing a piece of our cultural and individual memories: Barbabianca was born of the stories our grandparents used to tell us about village life, and of our own experiences in rural Italy. 

So we want to make it special for you. We want to share as many memories as we can, to light up your imagination when you sit down to play.

Anna's homecoming is one of the centerpieces of Barbabianca's story. Oscar has designed a GMless one-page game about Anna, the postcards she used to send home, and the memories of her still held dear by the villagefolk. It can be played on its own, or as a prelude to a game of Barbabianca.

Greetings from Anna is part of the Zinetopia 2026 event zine. Backers of at least 5 Zinetopia campaigns will get it along with dozens of other one-page games.

The world of Barbabianca is grounded in Italy's sprawling landscapes. Stone houses perched on hillsides and golden fields swaying in the wind, the silhouettes of Medieval castles and Roman ruins off in the distance, the hubbub about new railways and monumental city centres that herald the turn of the century. To help you picture it, we've gone on the hunt for vintage black-and-white postcards from Italy, most of them mailed sometime in the last century. They're an aid to your imagination, and a way to keep them traveling the world after so long. They're also a nice alternate way to play Greetings from Anna.

Sets of 4 postcards hand-picked by us are available as part of higher-tier pledges and as a campaign add-on.

Maria has designed a bespoke 4cm soft enamel pin to remember the Village by. It's available as part of higher-tier pledges and as a campaign add-on. In addition, Early Bird backers will get a free pin with every physical pledge!

This is the latest in a series of goodies we've been making to celebrate our games. If you want to stock up on pins or other goodies, you'll find them all available as add-ons.

Our plan is to begin fulfillment of all orders by May 2026. We're almost ready to print the game, with only additional material unlocked by campaign stretch goals still needing to be finished.

For worldwide shipping, with the exception of the USA, NessunDove will handle shipping through the Italian postal service. We use untracked international mail to keep costs affordable, which means the delivery estimate will range from 8 to 25 business days depending on where you are in the world. For the United States, we have previously collaborated with the good folks of Indie Press Revolution and would like to do so again: whether this is feasible will depend on the number of US pledges and on the evolving trade landscape. We are in the position to handle all orders ourselves, should the need arise.

If you're a retailer or distributor, no matter where you are in the world, we're happy to get in touch: we've created a 1€ pledge for the campaign as a reminder to discuss order quantities once production is underway.