Award-winning designer Jeeyon Shim’s next project blends chess and role-playing
Award-winning tabletop game designer Jeeyon Shim is crowdfunding for a new project called The Snow Queen, a keepsake fantasy game flush with art and introspection built atop chess-based gameplay mechanics. After raising more than $100,000 for previous projects on Kickstarter, this time they’re doing it on her own. For The Snow Queen, Shim is going entirely independent, eschewing the popular crowdfunding platform in exchange for something appropriately hand-made. And so far, it’s working: Shim’s The Snow Queen reached full funding — $8,000 — in 90 minutes following its kick off. It’s currently raised 162% of that goal at the time of writing, with 30 days to go.
“I want to put this out as a helpful example for people who feel tied to existing platforms to launch a project,” Shim told Polygon in an interview ahead of the crowdfunding campaign. “I want to show that it’s possible to do things, to launch a project, on your terms.”
The Snow Queen, as Shim describes it, is a fairytale fantasy game for two players that uses the mechanics of chess to drive the story. Everything is centered around the two player-characters, the Snow Queen and the village girl, the details of which are created by the players ahead of the game. For the two player-characters, the Snow Queen and the village girl, their worlds mirror each other, and ultimately one will be saved and the other destroyed.
“It feels really fun to make something so directly drawn from fairytales and folktales, but not a direct, Eurocentric interpretation,” Shim said.
Gameplay progresses through the chess match, chronicling prompts in a notebook nearby. The players must take chess pieces, much like in actual chess, but following different rules to save one world — the player
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