Imagine you’re in a universe where chess isn’t sold as one product. You’re in the universe where when you walk into a game store, you find Chess starter sets and booster packs. A starter set gives you enough pieces to play: 14 pawns, a knight, and a king.

You sit down to play against your friend who has been playing a few months longer than you and started attending local tournaments. He fields 2 queens and a rook, bishop, and two knights against your starter set. If you want more pieces, he tells you that the cheapest way to get some more is to buy a booster pack of random pieces.

He further explains that the odds of finding a queen in a booster are quite low, so he decided to buy a case of boosters to find one. He was able to trade 3 knights and a rook for his second queen. You can see in a trash bin he has thrown away at least two dozen of what he calls “bulk pawns”.

It’s at this point he tells you that in a few months the new “Pawns of Absolution” booster set will be released with new queens that can also move like knights. He expects to buy another case of random boosters hunting for one of these Knight-Queens.

Your friend sees your look of confusion and cheerily informs you that if you don’t want to chase the random boosters, you can pre-order a Knight-Queen on the secondary market for only $115.

Thanks, I hate it.

If that sounds like an unappealing model for Chess then why does it make millions of dollars in profit for card games? Why haven’t any of the games that challenged this model directly overtaken it? In fact, not only have they failed to overtake it, most of them have outright stopped being supported or produced. The new card games that are coming out today (Lorcana, One Piece, Gundam, Riftbound, Star Wars Unlimited) are all random booster based games. It didn’t have to be this way.

In the 2010s Fantasy Flight Games recognized that there might be a market for people interested in the kind of gameplay that trading card games offered but without all the hassle of chasing random cards or buying singles. They produced a slew of products under a new model they called the “Living Card Game”. New expansions would regularly come out, ban lists would be tweaked, cards would be errata’d, and tournaments would be held at local stores. But every card was available for purchase in non-randomized expansions and core sets.

FFG produced living card games for The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Android: Netrunner, Legend of the Five Rings, Arkham Horror, and Marvel. Huge IPs that grabbed a lot of attention when they landed in stores. Most of these games burned brightly for two or three years before slowly collapsing in on themselves. Of that long list only two of them are still being officially supported: Arkham Horror and Marvel Champions. Notably, Arkham and Marvel are both cooperative titles and not competitive games. A lot of competitive gamers gave a lot of these games a try and stuck around for a long time off the backs of the community that formed around them. In particular, Android: Netrunner is still maintained to this day by a fan community that is actively producing new cards for it.

What happened to the official support? Why did the living card games mostly die off?

1. Psychology is a bitch - It can’t be denied that, for many players, a part of the “fun” of card games like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon is collecting cards and cracking packs open. Often the highest value chase cards which players are looking for aren’t the most powerful in the game but ones with rare alternative arts, unique holographic effects, etc. Even if opening randomized packs isn’t the primary way in which you buy cards, you will still get boosters or randomized product. Even if you’re buying pre-made decks they often include a booster pack or a 1 of 5 alternate art printing. If you’re engaging with any of the big popular trading card games you’re getting some level of randomized dopamine boosting off of their product. They are juicing us, folks.

While I’m not a fan of designing products this way it is obvious why people like it. And to be clear, it’s not like my brain is immune to this either. I’ve played basically every trading card game I could get my hands on for at least a few rounds. I love cracking a pack as much as the next over-evolved ape. But I think most people recognize that, even while it is fun, it’s kind of a sham. Like going to a casino in Vegas, you’re cracking packs for the experience and not because you actually expect to pull that mythic rare/hit the jackpot playing slots. (But maybe this time?)

On a base level, LCGs just don’t have that. By definition, they sold you exactly what they said on the tin. Your brain doesn’t get to pull the magic dopamine lever of anticipation and surprise. While some gamers (including me) view this as a strength, a cavalcade of market forces and human tendencies collided to doom most of these games to a short life span.

2. LCG’s cost of entry was constantly rising - To continually drive engagement from players (and to continually make more money), new products were regularly being released for these games. There were big box releases called “deluxe expansions” which often brought a ton of cards and new major mechanics or factions into the game and then there were smaller packs sold in cycles. For Android, there were 5 deluxe expansions and 48 data packs. Maybe players were freed from the shackles of randomness but they were essentially required to buy cards every other month in order to keep up with the meta. And that’s just the problem for the players who started playing at launch.

If you wanted to join the game and play competitively after a few years into the launch of an LCG you may require cards from literally dozens of these packs to construct your optimized deck. There was no quick and easy path to “just playing”. LCGs mostly did not sell pre-constructed decks. This presented a confusing array of options to a new player just trying to get their feet wet. And if you were ready to dive into a competitive deck you had to sink hundreds of dollars for all the various expansions needed. At that point a lot of players ask themselves, why wouldn’t I just play the more popular card games my friends are already playing? The supposedly cheaper promise of the LCG model evaporates when it tries to copy the trading card model of constant expansion.

3. The traditional TCG model is better for your Friendly Local Game Store - As a result of #2, LCGs had to compete for immediate shelf space with other TCGs. Boosters have a significantly more profitable presence at the front counter that drives impulse buys in a way these small pre-determined expansions for LCGs never could. As a result your store owner is unlikely to keep living card game core sets on that valuable shelf space. Once your local community has purchased the most recent expansion, the rest will sit unsold. On top of that, FFG put out half a dozen games in a short period of time with competing audiences. Undoubtedly there was overlap between Netrunner and Warhammer 40k, or Legend of the Five Rings and Game of Thrones. They flooded their own market by being over excited with IP licenses.

But because there is no incentive or “chase value” off random card packs in any LCG, the local players have no reason to keep buying those products from the store once they have their one copy even if they were invested in more than one LCG. As a result of all of these pressures, if they are stocked at all they get relegated to a smaller section for board games and often a store owner has to guess at which of these products will be popular with their local card players. But those products aren’t packaged and marketed as board games, so they also do poorly with that crowd.

Traditional TCG boosters have another advantage for the local store over the LCGs in that the products have a giftability factor. A single booster pack is relatively cheap and easy to pick up for your friend or family.  Oh it’s your birthday? Do you like Pokemon/Magic/One Piece cards? Here’s a few boosters. You don’t have to think about if they already have this product, even if they’ve opened some chances are good there’s some kind of rare card in the set that they haven’t pulled yet.

4. The marriage to IP helped as much as it hurt - This is a problem specific to Fantasy Flight Games, but FFG was largely the company leading this market experiment. In order to get immediate buy-in and interest for their game systems FFG smartly slapped tons of hot intellectual property all over their cards. While this generated a ton of hype for fans of those properties and undoubtedly brought players into the tabletop gaming ecosystem who wouldn’t have been there otherwise, it also meant that when those rights went away so did the product.

I want to again acknowledge that Android: Netrunner is a unique case in so far as the organization that came together to keep it going after its official death has been nothing short of extraordinary, but it is the exception that proves the rule. Also, as a business study, it still effectively failed as a commercial product once Wizards of the Coast decided they didn’t like FFG taking a chunk out of their market share. Whether it’s Warhammer, Star Wars, or Marvel, the company that is producing those games is beholden to that licensee.
You also open yourself up to the whims of these massive temperamental fanbases. The Game of Thrones card game I’m sure sold a lot of copies for a lot of years, but once the popularity died down, the game was cooked. It was never going to keep getting official support.

The fundamental problem with most LCGs wasn't the fixed distribution model. It’s a part of the problem, but it isn’t the whole picture. These games failed to take full advantage of their own medium and remained too much like trading card games. Instead of embracing what made them unique, they tried copying TCG expansion schedules without the psychological hooks that make those schedules profitable for stores or fun for players. It was a mish mash of design ethos and the reality of retail and how players buy stuff. I believe that LCGs did have the opportunity to create something genuinely different: complete, self-contained strategic systems that could generate endless gameplay through emergent complexity rather than artificial content drip-feeding.

The release schedule put an impossible demand on the game designers and on the players. Every LCG expansion needed to justify its existence to competitive players AND casual players, while booster pack games could include "chaff" that served other purposes like limited formats or budget alternatives. This meant LCG designers had to make every single card mechanically interesting and competitively relevant, creating enormous pressure that led to power creep, excessive complexity, and increasingly narrow design spaces.
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Consider how games like Chess or StarCraft achieve decades of strategic depth with fixed rule sets. These games don't need constant expansions because their core systems are rich enough to support evolving metas, emerging strategies, and continuous discovery. Players spend years mastering the same pieces or units, finding new combinations and counter-strategies that the designers never explicitly intended. This is the model I believe could have let LCGs thrive: creating dense, mechanically rich systems where the complete card pool enables deep strategic exploration. Provide expansions, but make them infrequent and impactful.

When we designed Black Hats, we specifically tried to learn from these failures. Rather than planning expansion cycles from day one, we focused on cramming as much strategic density as possible into a single box. The goal was to create a chess-like experience using card game mechanics where new strategies and meta developments emerge organically from players exploring the complete system, not from publishers releasing new content every month. We wanted to prove that a card game could achieve long-term engagement through mechanical depth rather than artificial scarcity or content treadmills.

This approach also addresses the expansion fatigue that killed many LCGs. When players are already invested in Magic, Pokemon, or other ongoing TCGs, asking them to keep up with yet another monthly release schedule is unsustainable. Most card game players don't want (or can’t afford) a dozen different games demanding constant financial investment. It is better to offer them a game that rewards deep engagement over time with the types of mechanics and strategy they already love. By creating complete, standalone experiences that don't require ongoing purchases, a new card game might actually compete for mindshare rather than wallet share.

The LCG model's greatest strength was always the promise of a level playing field where strategy mattered more than spending power. But most LCGs squandered this advantage by becoming subscription services in disguise, trading the gambling problem of boosters for the commitment problem of endless expansion cycles. The real opportunity lies in combining LCG accessibility with board game completeness: creating strategic systems rich enough to sustain communities for years without requiring constant feeding from the publisher's content pipeline.

I may have overstated my thesis a little in the title of this blog post. Not ALL of the LCGs are dead entirely. More like on life support. However, the fact that some LCGs have continued after their official demise and the initial incredibly positive reaction to almost all of these games at their launch tells me that there is still a hunger for what they were providing. The great work that these designers did and the genuine risk taking that FFG took in bringing these games to market was impressive. I just wish more of them were still around.

​Anyway, that’s basically why we made Black Hats the way we did. Who would’ve read a post titled that?

I wanted to provide a transparent update on the challenges we're facing with bringing Black Hats to your table. As we have discussed, there have been significant changes to the tariff situation for games manufactured in China since we planned our initial campaign, and we want to explain in depth how this affects Dice or Death Games and our plans for Black Hats.

The Numbers
Let's cut straight to the data: Current tariff rates on goods imported from China have skyrocketed to 145%, which is dramatically higher than the 20-30% rates we initially calculated when planning our Gamefound campaign.

To put this in perspective:

• Our manufacturing costs with Panda are approximately $15,000
• Our original funding goal of $20,000 was designed to cover manufacturing, freight, and the anticipated tariffs at that time
• Under the new 145% tariff rate, we would need to pay an additional $16,500 just in tariffs alone
• That's equivalent to selling an additional 272 copies of the game before we even have the funds to pay the import fees

I have to be realistic about our market reach, especially at a time when people are rightfully concerned about their own finances - that is not a realistic number for us to hit within the next few months.

It's hard to overstate how extreme this increase is. Even with Panda generously invoicing only 75% of our bill as taxable costs, the tariff amount is actually higher than our entire manufacturing invoice. The math works out to 108.75% of our original manufacturing costs just in tariffs.

Our Plan Going Forward
We've been evaluating all possible options to ensure we can get Black Hats into your hands without massive delays or price increases. Here's our current strategy:

1. Split Warehousing Approach: We are trying to arrange to warehouse the majority of our inventory in China for the time being, while only importing enough games to fulfill backer rewards and promotional needs.
2. Targeted Importing: By bringing in a smaller quantity of games, we can manage the immediate tariff costs while still fulfilling our commitments to you, our backers and supporters.
3. Playing the Long Game: We're hoping these extreme tariff rates will come down in the near future, at which point we can bring the remainder of the inventory to domestic warehouses.
4. Legal Action: Dice or Death Games has passed along our information alongside other publishers to Stonemaier Games and their lawyers who are challenging these unprecedented tariff increases. We believe this is necessary to protect our industry and your access to board games at reasonable prices and we would be remiss if we did not add our voice to that chorus.

Fulfillment Changes
Due to recent price increases and the relatively small size of our campaign, we've determined that working with Quartermaster Logistics for fulfillment would be prohibitively expensive at this time. Instead, I'll be personally handling the fulfillment of all backer and late pledger orders. Given that we're looking at approximately 100 packages, this is something I can manage directly.

This change actually opens up some new possibilities, particularly for our EU customers who are willing to pay their own shipping costs. We can now work with you directly to get your games to you without the additional layers of logistics providers.
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We may still partner with Quartermaster for online order fulfillment once we're able to bring our inventory stateside, but for now, this direct approach gives us more flexibility in these challenging circumstances.

What This Means For You
If you're a backer who has pledged for a copy of Black Hats, rest assured that getting the game to you remains our absolute #1 priority. If I have to get on a frakking bicycle with the game in my backpack to get it to you, then that's what I'll do. We're committed to fulfilling all existing orders, though this situation may impact wider availability in the short term.

Thank You!
We want to sincerely thank you for your patience and support during these uncertain times. The board game industry is facing unprecedented challenges, but it's the passion of the players and backers that keeps small indies like Dice or Death Games moving forward.

We'll continue to provide updates as the situation evolves and as we get closer to fulfillment. In the meantime, we're still hard at work making sure Black Hats is the best cyberpunk hacking experience it can be when it lands on your table.
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Stay connected.

I have returned from the best four days in gaming.

Black Hats' banner waved all convention long in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, calling any and all to "Hack the Planet!" with us on GameFound this September the 17th.

It was an incredible opportunity to get our game in front of fresh eyes. The game has evolved significantly based on our first round of GenCon feedback and our subsequent Discord league.

The players at our table responded exactly how I would hope as a game designer.

We heard none of the complaints that we did in our first year, replaced by a newer (smaller) set of design challenges around the new player experience that we can tackle prior to our launch in September. All programmers know that swapping one error message for another is progress!

​I may have buried the lede here in my excitement over quality feedback, so one more time for my people in the cheap seats -

Black Hats will be launching on GameFound September 17th, 2024!

If playing via our Tabletop Simulator Mod isn't your thing and you just need that meat space real world copy of Black Hats in your hands (and hey, who doesn't?) you will be able to chip in your hard earned credits to make it happen next month. This trip is only going to peak with your help!

And one more thanks so much to all of our play testers at GenCon! Your positive feedback feeds our passion and your negative feedback stokes our designer brains to do better. We won't stop working until the best version of Black Hats we can make is sitting on your gaming table.

Hello World
If you were only keeping tabs on Black Hats via this blog, I would forgive you for thinking that Erik and I had suddenly gone missing on a transatlantic flight. Or perhaps we’d fallen into a wormhole, or for some other tragic reason stopped working on this game. Rest assured, we remain as corporeally bound to meatspace as we are dedicated to Black Hats.

Of course, you’re probably already a member of our Discord community, so you would already know that we’ve been kicking the tires and adding fresh coats of paint to Black Hats since our first appearance at Gen Con 2023.

But maybe you’re the sort of incredible person who likes “reading” and “concise information” - in which case I apologize for how I write (I am told it is an affront to both readers and conciseness). I’m going to break it down into a three part series.

This is Part 1 and lays out everything we have been up to since our update last year. Part 2 will share our plans for Black Hats’ future leading up to our crowdfunding campaign. Finally, Part 3 with our ambitions for the far future of Black Hats.

Total Visual Overhaul
If there is a single reference point for the general art direction I try to provide, it would be the Neuromancer game for the Super Nintendo that never existed. There is a kind of retro-future technology presented in early cyberpunk that grabbed at the right direction that our technology was headed at the time. What they predicted correctly was the function of how networked computers would evolve into every facet of our lives. Less accurately predicted was the form that technology would take.

“Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel. There’s adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.” ― William Gibson, Neuromancer

The original cyberpunk aesthetic is chunky. The world of William Gibson’s Sprawl is more analogue than what a person in 2024 could consider futuristic. That world doesn’t run on solid-state drives, it runs on tape-decks. It doesn’t use touch screens, it uses thick mechanical keyboards. The cyberpunk of the 90s could not conceive of wireless technology. Everything must be cabled, the thicker, the better. As late as 1999, The Matrix was still conceiving of a world dominated by a connected phone line system.

That vision of the future is largely consigned to the dust-bin of history alongside the chrome plated flying cars of 1950s science fiction. But for me, I just can’t fall out of love with the clicky button cable laden CRT monitor-driven aesthetics of those works. I’ve done my best to work with the artists I commissioned to bring out that aesthetic flavor all over Black Hats - from the characters to the cards and tokens.

As you can see from this handy graphic, every token in the game has been re-designed to be more thematic and have a better game feel. Our community of play testers weighed in their feedback as well to make sure the game elements were presented clearly.

I just love how the game feels in the hand now. Fanning through a pile of rigs feels like looking at a little pile of pixel microchips. Rig and runner cards have an aligned texture showing where they “plug” into each other. Going through the executables, their fonts and coloring, gives the effect of peering into a little command terminal window with a dull CRT glow. When a runner has taken their activation they now exhaust to the classic hourglass icon sprite as they await the round end.

It all adds up to a distinctly pixelated-analogue-cyberpunk look when it hits the table that makes it just a joy to engage with for this old millennial cyber cowboy.

More Characters!
Since Gen Con we have commissioned art for three additional runners, now 50% of the runners in the game have their art and tokens!

A Play Test League!
While the art was cooking, we organized a playtesting league among several of our discord players to search out anything too broken to hit the printer. The results of the league gave way to our last big change to how scoring and the end game worked. Gone are the semi-confusing 3 points ahead rules, but they have been replaced with a new variable scoring system which bases points earned for data scored on the damage values of your deck. This change reinforced the value of damage numbers as a balancing force against a cards primary effect text, which helped to reign in some of the abusive strategies that emerged in the league.

​Here are some prizes our players earned caught in the wild-

Hi, Erik here, long-time reader, first-time poster.

A couple years ago, shortly after we developed the "subnet" mechanic that would become the core of Black Hats, I came up with a card type called a "daemon" that would be played permanently onto the board with a corner of the card touching a system on the outside border and would thereafter apply an effect to that subnet. It was unique and fun and it sucked and now I feel a deeper connection to Travis Coates.

Ray is the hero behind Black Hats, but this was the start of my villain arc.

Since then, I have made it my life's work to critique, rework, and cut as many other mechanics and cards from Black Hats as I possibly can in the name of my beloved daemons. I'm writing this post today to boast about my latest victim: the rootkit.

I already don't miss it.

During the Gencon games, no other rule or mechanic was responsible for half so many mid-game questions and requests to be reminded of what it even was. Countless runner activations passed where the players forgot it was even a thing and, if I may be perfectly honest with you, after years of working on Black Hats, I also frequently forget about it.

Removing this would, of course, require reworking several runners, executables, and even one of the rigs. It's telling that it only took me about an hour to come up with alternatives for all of them and I already like 95% of them better than their rooty predecessors.
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The real winners, though, are me and Ray and any of you who might one day try to teach Black Hats to someone else: no longer must you say "well except for the allied rootkit token" after the handy mnemonic of "you can't hack anything with a piece of cardboard on it".

WOW!

The response that Black Hats received at GenCon was greater than we could have hoped for. In addition to the 24 players who played with us in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, we were able to run 8 demo tables in Lucas Oil Stadium which were attended by a total of 35 more!

Over 50 gamers decided to spend some of their limited time at GenCon playing Black Hats. With so much to do and so many other games available we consider it an honor that anyone would take a chance on us. For those who did take that chance, the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.​

This was not only our first time bringing Black Hats out in to such a public venue but also our first time running events at a convention ourselves. We were absolutely wiped by the end of the day on Sunday but it was so worth it to see so many people having fun with the game. Every time someone had an audible "aha!" moment when they found a new line of play with their runners was more fuel in our tanks to keep working hard on this game.

I think as a game designer, if your goal is to make something that feels unique and new, it's important to somewhat work in isolation from other games. At least for my own brain, I find it too easy to let other games bleed too strongly into my own work. There is something to be said for not being too strongly steeped in genre convention.

For the same reason, I think it is also important to be extremely judicious in parsing player feedback. There is a balance to be found between letting players make design choices for you and being too stubborn to kill your design babies when you are told they don't work.

Okay, but why am I going on a random diatribe about authorial intent in game design... Because for over 2 years we worked in that isolated bubble on a game that we were growing to love, showing it to handfuls of very specific players at a time and we had no idea if anyone else was even going to like it, much less love it.

If we came out of this design with a game that only ever got played on the kitchen table by ourselves and our friends, that would've been enough. We thought Black Hats was good, but we had no idea if you would. It is both humbling and inspiring that literally dozens of strangers told us to keep going after getting their hands on it.

So that is what we are going to do!

Black Hats will be at GenCon 2023!
Schedule Here: https://www.gencon.com/events?search=Black+Hats&opt=ta&opt=hh

How we got here:
Something like 6 months ago, we decided to bring Black Hats to Gen Con in August 2023. This has coincided with what I think people with different degrees from me might call a “soft launch”. Along with trying to spread the word of the game and get players running matches on discord, we committed to physicalizing the game for Gen Con.

The game has existed as a tabletop simulator mod for long enough that we didn't want to lose sight of actually printing the game. In retrospect, it sounds reckless, but for over 2 years we never actually played a game of Black Hats within the confines of meat space.

We had taken efforts to only play the game in tabletop simulator, unassisted by newfangled scripting. We had a level of confidence that the game would work on paper that was almost entirely unjustified, given our experience with producing quality game components. Bolstered only by the fact that the game wasn't particularly annoying to play with TTS.

Through the power of human will, money, and thegamecrafter.com we have completed a summoning ritual, bringing forth three copies of Black Hats from the ether...

​After dozens of paper plays of the game, our tabletop simulator testing largely paid off. Along with my years of meme making in photoshop and making painfully mid sprite art, we were able to pull together a really nice set of prototype Black Hats copies.

And those copies are coming to Gen Con with me next week!

It has been a challenge to get here. While I have been to Gen Con numerous times as an attendee, this is my first year running events of my own, making sure everything was ready to bring on time has been stressful but incredibly rewarding as for the first time we held the game in our real hands and are prepared to get into the hands of as many gamers as possible.

We hope you will join us at Gen Con for some exciting games of Black Hats!

As we drag this game kicking and screaming into the light of public criticism I thought it an appropriate time to look back on the nearly three year long journey to get Black Hats to the state it is in today.

It all started with an innocuous google chat:

The pitch that followed was a little rambley but the seed of Black Hats was there from the beginning. Spawned out of late night Yugioh anime binges and a desire to see cards having sweeping effects over the environment of the battlefield.

At that point we were off to the races burning through iteration after iteration of the game. The initial prototyping cards that I was coming up with looked like this:

For much of the early development we had in our head a fantasy style game where hexes denoted types of terrain. We were aping off of magic's core types with hexes for plains, forests, mountains, etc.

Flipping cards for damage and effects was integrated early in the design as a way to get rid of dice and lean into the card game feel we wanted. Our bigger design challenge at the time was how to handle the board.

Ultimately having too many types of terrain with too many unique effects baked into them made the game extremely complicated to play. At the time we were also using upwards of half a dozen different tokens to denote different status effects and buffs.

You can see at this point the board was still MASSIVE in comparison to the iteration that we settled on. There were simply too many hexes for the board to be easily readable and subnets were not yet well defined in the game. Most tiles began the game in a "neutral" state still which no longer exists in the design.

Ultimately the concept of subnets, infinite range within them, and slowing movement between them, allowed us to drastically reduce the number of hexes needed down. It made the board easier to read and there was less to learn before you could hop into the action.

At this point with subnets and movement integrated, we started ruthlessly culling every mechanic that wasn't essential to the core vision of the game and added needless complexity. In the screenshot above you can see we still had two resources represented by hex tokens.

"Crypto" was a resource akin to mana or energy and was used to play cards from hand while "Exploits" were a resource that could be used for generic hacking actions. Crypto was ultimately just an unfun and needless mechanic for our game while exploits were wrapped into the cyberdeck, allowing players to decide how much they wanted to emphasize hacking in their builds.

The board got smaller and smaller as we continued to trim the fat literally and metaphorically from this turkey, but by this point in the prototyping we were down to fussing the fine details. Neutral systems were completely gone and we started experimenting with different starting configurations for the board.

And with that we reach the current, although certainly not final, version of Black Hats. We could not be prouder of the core gameplay loop that we have forged over these past years.

In just a few images you can get a peek into the evolution that the game has gone through, while at the same time remaining absolutely true to the original vision for the game that we started chatting about on day 1. At this point I'm just excited to explore the tactical space we have set up and jam out more games!