PRE ORDER! I hope to ship these out by November! Read more about it on the Kickstarter! Please join the Discord for all the updates!

The Restless is a cooperative, dungeon-crawler style card game for 2-4 players, set during the final days of an infertility apocalypse. The game creates a uniquely challenging collaborative experience that pits a team of weak, resource-starved characters against an increasingly hostile world of shapeshifting monsters, bizarre traps, and treacherous environments.

The entire game, the packaging, the rules, and all 750+ cards, were drawn or painted by me, by hand. I wrote and designed every part of the narrative experience as well.

The game is huge and meticulously crafted, but very straightforward to play. Beneath the surface, nuanced mechanics create interesting gameplay scenarios that more experienced tabletop players will enjoy. The Restless is a one-of-a-kind tabletop experience steeped in dread, awe, camaraderie, and terror. 

HOW TO PLAY:

Your team of 2-4 players choose characters and starting equipment and begin a journey through the first of five realms of increasing difficulty, with each realm containing 4+ Encounters. As you travel, you’ll battle monsters, trade with merchants, and gather the experience and equipment needed to fight the final battle against the Traitor God.

As you fight, you’ll lose health. Healing is hard to find in The Restless, and the most consistent restoration occurs while resting. The smoke draws nearer with every passing moment, and your party only has 3 nights of rest available before you must press forward or die. After five realms, you confront 1 of 11 Traitor Gods. Each battle is unique, with special rules, challenges, and strategies.

The game is based around the D20 and the D4. Characters take turns attacking monsters. If their roll fails, the monster’s attacks are triggered against them. The combat may appear very simple, but it is open to countless variations. Players take turns in any order and can stack their turns in interesting ways, use impactful items, and bounce effects off each other, so thinking laterally will help your party survive.

THE TAROT RESTLESS EXPANSION

I created a fully re-imagined deck of tarot cards called The Tarot Restless, and this work can be added to this game to create a kind of hard/advanced mode for more experienced players. This deck is normally $60, but you can add it to your game for just $40.

Included with the tarot deck is get a booklet that details how to use the deck, the lore behind the expansion, and the function for every card. This expansion is for advanced players where all combat encounters are 1 point harder, which does not sound like much but makes a huge difference over time. At the start of every realm, players can consult the tarot cards by paying 4 health to the deck. Usually, each player pays 1 health, but some can pay more if other players don't want to partake. If that's the case, characters that don't partake won't gain any benefits from the tarot cards drawn in this instance.

After paying health, 4 cards are drawn (5 if you have an Omenist character in your party). Of them, 1 can be taken. Each card has a unique ability, some are better than others. Because I'm not bound by the size of the cards, these cards can be much more interesting and nuanced in their function.

One of them spawns a trader that allows players to sell items for status effects, one upgrades all future status effects to much more powerful versions, another removes all the special text on a card. One allows for an instant resurrection of a dead Character, others bind two characters together so one can carry the burdens of another. I didn't want to add another complicating layer to the game, like a system or currency that you'd have to manage, so these cards tend to fall into broad categories of Blessings (weightless buffs that apply to single characters), Global Blessings (placeholder name, but it's the same as above but for all characters), consumables, and pooled resources that can be accessed by anyone. Some are highly powerful and require sacrifices to activate. It's hard to give a broad overview because there are so many different things going on in the game, but as with everything else in the game, the text is all you need.

The Tarot Restless adds 100 silver-trimmed cards to your game, adding tons of interesting interactions, challenges, and more. It also comes with a full book of short stories that delineate the lore of the game.

If you have any questions about any of the above, feel free to email me: winslowdumaine@gmail.com