 I'm Sophie and I'm a games designer for Needy Cat Games and I was the lead designer on League of Infamy. League of Infamy is a dungeon crawling game where instead of playing heroes who descend into dark dank dungeons you are actually a band of villains sort of working together to assault resplendent hero fortresses. So we like to call it a co-operatish, you're kind of co-operating but as your villains really your main mission is to look out for number one. If you don't work together you won't be able to win but only one of you can actually win. So there comes a point where you can stab people in the back, you can steal loot from both the heroes and your fellow villains and you can do all sorts of sneaky tricks to try and get ahead. So what makes League of Infamy different to a typical dungeon crawler is that there is that sort of adversarial element. There is a group of villains who are all having to work together. The game is designed so that if you don't work together there's just no way you're going to win the game. But there comes a point where every villain has a choice where they start working for themselves and not for the betterment of the group. And that's just a fantastic element because people can be tempted to start backstabbing and stealing from their fellow villains quite early on but if they do that then they put the mission at risk. But at the same time everyone makes that decision differently and hubris is one of the best ways to get really fun moments in games. I've seen villains play it very straight laced until the very last dice roll and then totally screw each other over and I've seen people immediately backstabbing from turn one and it's fantastic every time. I think another thing is that the way the Keep Master works is that that is a player and they get some really interesting decisions and choices throughout the game. So it's not a game where the Keep Master is basically running the game like a GM would for an RPG. They are actively trying to upset the villains, make their job much more harder. And it becomes incredibly rewarding when you get a foothold over the villains because they backstabbed one another at the same time. So that becomes a brilliant fulfilling cycle of like you backstab and then the Keep Master does something and then that gets really bad so you have to work together and then you get into a bit moment where you take a breath so you do another backstab and it just becomes this whole cycle. So it is a dungeon crawler, it's very hard. So even though we say it's co-op petition you know it's a bit different. You know at the very core of League of Infamy you're moving from corridors and rooms, you're gaining loot, you're exploring areas. You have to make decisions about whether you risk exploring new areas if there's enemies still on the board. You are trying to complete missions and there are rewards and levelling up in between games for you completing those missions. And there are consequences if you fail to do them as well. So you know it is very much at its heart a traditional dungeon crawler but what we've done is made it fun and varied and something that will have a different playing experience every time you have a go. Oh that's a tricky one. I really love the disorder cards. They're a really fun element that we wanted to bring into the game where basically disorder cards are things that you can play throughout the game that allow you to do things to betray your allies when you're the villain. And they were such a key element to the theme and the feel and the sort of the storytelling like this emergent storyline that comes out. I've seen so many people go, I actually pickpocketed you. So now you don't have that healing potion and they go, actually I do because I've got this other disorder card which means I steal it back off of you and then someone else is like, oh no you dropped it. So neither one of you gets it. And it just becomes the stacking of like ridiculous storylines simply from playing these cards in certain orders. And I love that. I love the sort of the emergent storytelling and the fact that people genuinely come away from the game going oh do you remember that time when I was just about to kill the guy but you did this thing? And I think that's one of the best elements. It's a really tricky one to decide who my favourite character is. I think it's got to be the Abyssal Dwarf. He is such a fun character and I think I haven't seen a game where someone, one of the players hasn't picked him because he's so ridiculous. He's got two ridiculously loud guns and he basically charges into every room like Yosemite Sam, like shooting at the ceiling. He's really loud. I like to think he's partially deaf. Like he's spent so long and he's so highly skilled as this ridiculous rifleman. But it's affected his hearing and now he has no idea that he just isn't capable of being stealthy. You know, he was sort of sneaking through an elven fortress and I was like shh. And he's like what? I just love that idea of him and he's probably my favourite character. So our main influences were that this was a game that was going to be set in the Kings of War universe. So we were really passionate about baking the theme really strongly into the game and I think that that comes through with the style of enemies that you face and the sort of style of fighting that everyone has. But also a really big influence of course was that Needy Cat Games worked on Hellboy previously. So we've got some similar elements in there, the dice mechanics very similar and the modularity of all of the different decks has taken its influence from Hellboy because that works so well. It means that all of the different parts of the game are expandable or replaceable and you can move things around. There's also definitely some DNA from Dungeon Saga in there. It's a classic Mantic game and we really wanted to pay homage to it in this version. So that game takes a lot of influence from a lot of different places.