Well, hello there! Here we are again!

Now that the final remnants of Act 2 are finished and queued to put into the hands of the playtesters, Brooklynn has moved into the dev process of Act 3.

The Act 3 Diagram Book was completed this Monday which allows for Brooklynn to really start diving into this project. Act 3 should be a much smoother process. Since these Encounters were designed later, they don’t have some of the old issues that required cleaning up in Act 2.

Our goal is to have the first part of the Act 3 Adventure Book by this upcoming Monday.

Act 3 has a total of 16 Encounters and Brooklynn is pulling all-nighters, working weekends, and doing what has to be done to make this happen. We will be updating digital files of the Adventure Book as we finish with the development of each Encounter. Right now, we plan to have every Encounter in Act 3 into playtesting by early October. At that point, we will have the entire trilogy and every Bounty Pack uploaded for playtesting on Tabletop Simulator.

Time is flying by! Stop it, time! Slow down, would ya?

We’re also in the process of getting The Collector into TTS. We’ll get that up as soon as we can.

We have been getting an incredible amount of feedback from our playtesters and Ian has been hard at work implementing everything into our files. This is basically Ian’s full-time job until the project is complete.

We’re talking 1100+ lines of feedback, it’s wild. All the passionate fans helping us with this project are truly game design GOATS. This game is staggeringly huge. But Ian is a veteran in facing down staggeringly huge games. He’s already crushed through over 800 lines of the feedback and implemented it into our files. Once he gets to the end of this list, we’ll be posting the updated files for everyone to chew through. You can expect these new files uploaded on Monday. 

Additionally, you can expect another round of Tabletop Simulator updates. But there’s new feedback every morning!

Again, we can’t thank our playtesters enough for all they’re doing for us. There’s no way we could do this without you.

Our “last chance” preorder is going live on October 1st. We will collect final orders, and then begin mass production shortly after it concludes in early November.

With the molds for the miniatures already done, we’re left with only production and digital proofing. We will do our best to expedite the production process by starting the digital proof process of everything that is already finished for our outstanding Kickstarter.

With all this in mind, we’re really hoping to hit a Q2 2025 delivery timeline.

If you missed out on Middara, this upcoming preorder will be the best opportunity to get it. If you want in on this preorder, sign up for our newsletter .

You see the moment coming from a mile away. You’ve fought your way through hell to find this creature, overcoming every challenge they could throw into your path. Maybe they’re holding some item critical to your success, maybe they’re just here to assassinate a member of the party. Whatever the reason, you’ve finally reached your greatest adversary yet. Welcome to the boss fight.

Beyond and tremble, mortal.

In a board game like Middara, a boss fight serves several purposes. First, every single one in our game is here because they’re required by the story. The party refuses to bow to the world’s great powers and accept their fate. The best dramatic victory is one that’s hard-fought. How satisfying would it be if every adversary surrendered when faced with opposition?

Secondly, any long-time player of Middara will know that most encounters have an optimal strategy: advance cautiously, take on each Totem and group of spawns one at a time, and collect every token along the way. There are a handful of encounters that violate this precept, but not many. Boss fights allow an obvious exception. Many bosses can’t be defeated right away, requiring you to explore or otherwise interact with the environment, rather than just surrounding and ganking a giant pile of HP.

Click below to see Rubicant's Intelligent Combatant card!

(Warning: Spoilers!)

Where I rule, all bow.

No matter what your typical playstyle, bosses invite you to try something new. You can’t run past them to the Blue Exit and flee, and they’re immune to most of the effects that allow common combatants to be taken out. Each one has some new mechanic or interaction you’ll never encounter anywhere else in the game.

It’s hard to say more about any individual boss without spoiling major parts of Act 2 and Act 3. Instead, I’ll show off some of the incredible arenas we’ve constructed where some of these fights take place. 

Venture where others would flee.

Victory in the story of Middara: Unintentional Malum is not guaranteed. If it were, your choices would ultimately be meaningless. When designing our story, we aimed for a narrative with a wide variety of routes through to the other side. Whether Nightingale survives her experience, whether her friends can recognize the person she becomes or even want to live in the version of Elenia they create—all these are decisions you make, through gameplay and in story. What will you choose?

No matter the medium, for a choice to be meaningful it must have consequences. Middara offers several potential avenues to offer these: rewards (like items, gold, xp), endings, and flags. The former is easy to explain—some choices give simple rewards. Talk to someone, get gold, a new weapon, or learn a fancy discipline. Fail, and the absence of these items will be felt, compounding exponentially as you play through the game.

I wonder what this is for…

Then there are endings. These points help reinforce the reality of the stakes. To play a difficult game, on some level, is for the satisfaction of overcoming the painful reality of failure. Lose and lose and lose again, knowing the consequences of incorrect choices and poor strategy. That’s the joy of any random success mechanic—rolling that 20 and scoring a critical would mean nothing if there was a 20 printed on every side.

Failure itself is not the satisfying thing, of course. Any reader of classic Choose Your Own Adventure books will probably be familiar with the numberless random fail states. Pick a direction in a hallway, one of them leads to death, with no clues planted for a reader to know which is the correct choice.

There’s nothing fun about random failure. The universe we live in can feel capricious and pointless with the suffering it inflicts—a constructed game shouldn’t be.

So we offer choices that lead to death. Nightingale, our protagonist, is frequently faced with choices like this. Will she trade a tiny piece of her future in exchange for immediate, desperately needed power? Who will you choose as an ally in a desperate situation? Can these strangers be trusted? Is this native monster of Middara as rotten on the inside as its appearance suggests?

Memento Mori.

Take my hand, you can trust me.

Middara’s story is sprawling, with plenty of important choices outside the context of encounters. Who will you trust? Which lead will you follow? What should you do with a defeated foe? How much time do you have to prepare for an upcoming battle? Do you take a frightening risk to improve Nightingale’s odds of survival?

Many games and stories offer false choices. Say something different, get a marginally different slice of dialogue, and the game continues in effectively the same direction. Anyone who spends time with roleplaying games knows what I mean.

No matter how meaty we made our Adventure book, or how many millions of words of story I wrote, we would still be constrained in the scope of story we could tell. Our box can only fit so many tiles and miniatures. In reality, our choices aren’t infinite like this—development time spent on one path inherently requires less time on all others.

Given this tradeoff, we chose to limit the number of choices offered in the story, but make every single one impactful. No, Remi can’t abandon Nightingale to her fate and embrace her heritage to start smuggling weapons in Rhamstead for the rest of her life. That’s just not the story we set out to tell, or faithful to her character. At the same time, Remi does have a number of critical choices waiting for her, which permanently alter her fate in this (and future) products.

Players of Unintentional Malum: Act 1 will know how we do this: An Adventure Sheet.

Options galore!

Make a choice, lose a fight, fail to find something important? All recorded here. This checklist allows us to radically alter the course of the story, rather than just throwing in a few lines of unique dialogue. We leaned into the existing strengths of Middara when designing Act 2 + 3, offering more opportunities for choice and more consequences for each one.

Her survival is in your hands.

Your playthrough will not be exactly the same as anyone else’s. There is no ‘right’ way through the story, no single good end that’s objectively better than all others. Rather, there are different prices to be paid. Difficult choices wait for our heroes, choices that will weigh on them for the rest of their immortal lives. (unless you get some of them killed, of course!)

Some of those choices were already made back in Act 1. Those decisions will pay their dividends, positive and negative.

What’s more satisfying than making an important choice, and seeing the story change as a result? By the end of Unintentional Malum, you’ll leave Middara a changed place. None of our Adventurers will be the same, assuming they even survive. Their future is in your hands. 

Imagine a crack in reality, a hidden doorway between Earth and Middara. These enigmatic portals, are the lifeblood of human civilization in a world where Earth life cannot reproduce. Zealously guarded and fiercely contested, these finite gateways shape entire societies. Without them, Middara is desolate.

Read the lastest codex entry, Portals, here !

Also, just a heads up we've further fleshed out last week's codex, A Brief History of Elenia .

Check that one out here !

Next week, we're taking a dive into design philosophy for terrain and locations!

Discover how our new sheets system enriches the Encounters of UM2+3. We'll explore the philosophy and implications of sheets and tiles. Plus, uncover the secrets of the otherworldly spaces known as Rooms in our next Codex entry.

You won't want to miss this look at the surreal passageways between Earth and Middara! They're dying to meet you!