Forge the Narrative.

Hey everybody, welcome to Forge a Narrative. This is a very special episode. I'm talking

today to Michael Chenal. Hello, Paul. What's going on, man?

Oh, nothing much busy as usual, but good to see you again. Oh, yeah, man. Thanks for coming back on the show. We are the Bell of Lost Souls podcast, and today I want to talk specifically about a Kickstarter that just launched from Cool Mini or not. I guess I should have said who you were and where you're from, but we're talking about Zeno Shift Dreadmire.

Oh, I just kind of assume that everyone, everywhere, knows who I am.

Fair enough. At least that's what I like to think. Well, they certainly will. You keep putting out these games and they're going to. You know, living the dream, right? You know, next Eric Lang. Well, tell us about, I mean, what's your role in this Zeno Shift Dreadmire project and the whole Zeno Shift?

I mean, because there's a, there's an app, there's another board game, there's this. Tell me what's going on with this, man. Zeno Shift came about about over a year ago. Myself and the owner of our company, David Douse, were basically deciding we wanted to look into the card game market because, you know, it's an untapped market and we were cool, many or not. We wanted to expand a little bit. So we started looking at deck builders that are out there because we were like, hey, everyone loves deck builders. And we played a bunch of them and we're like, man, I really don't like deck builders. And it was disappointing because we just didn't find one that really grabbed us because a lot of them just, you know, they were just not our thing because of what we came to the conclusion. So one of our interns at the time said, like, well, I actually have my senior project that I worked on was a deck builder. You know, you guys want to take a look at it. So we did, and it had some neat ideas in it. So what ended up happening is we end up purchasing the game from him, and then taking the base concepts of it and revamping it into what eventually would become Zeno-shift. And the whole thing about it was, it was a deck builder, but it was actually functioning more like a tower defense game,

like you would see in like your mobile phone games and things like that. So this was kind of like a little cheat.

It wasn't a true deck builder.

It was a tower defense game with deck building elements.

But we really liked it, the concept of it.

So we took that initial idea there and spent about another year developing it and crafting

it up into an actual full game.

And that was Zeno Shipped Onslaught.

So that released about a year ago. And today, we have launched the Kickstarter for the sequel standalone game, Xenostredmire. It is a sequel, but it is a standalone game. You don't need the first one to play this one. Correct. You can buy this one and play it right out of the box and you're just fine, but you can take all the components of it as well and mix them with the core game to enhance the way the game plays. Basically, each game... Could you mix them all together to make like a giant board game? Is that one of the ways you can do it? So the way the game functions is basically you are deploying different troops and equipment down into your different lanes to defend your base. completely co-op between one and four players to defend against waves of oncoming aliens.

So in the core game, they were eight different troop types and 24 different item types,

and then an enemy deck called the Hive.

And basically, the game scaled up over the course of nine turns.

Every three turns, the game would advance.

You would get access to better troops.

The hive decks would get a little more fierce.

And the whole goal of the game was just survive nine rounds.

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