The Queen Dowager's Board Game

📖 Synopsis

You come from a family of minor nobility in the Kingdom of Vernica. One day, out of nowhere, a summons arrives from the royal palace. You have been chosen as "conversation partner" to the retired Queen Dowager Hortensia. The job: travel to the White Heron Villa three times a week, play her at the board game Regina, and make small talk. An extravagant salary, an appointment that makes no sense. No one has ever lasted long, was all the mistress of the household added.

Across the board, the Queen Dowager often lets slip little remarks to herself. Something about reassigning the gardeners. Something about the young people in the kitchen. And yet, come the next morning, appointments of exactly that shape somehow move in the real court. You come to realize it. The pieces are not the only things being played on this board.

👥 Characters

Queen Dowager Hortensia is a master of the rambling old story and the parable. She sees through everything, and offers you tea with the face of someone who knows nothing. Her attendant, Griselda, mistress of the household, is a woman of venomous wit who stabs people without ever breaking perfect etiquette. Her remarks begin with "if I may be so bold," and she has never once been anything but bold. Outside the villa, the struggle between the young king and the chancellor over control of appointments is coming to a boil, and everyone wants a seat at the Queen Dowager's "tea-time chatter."

🎭 How to Play This Story

Across the board, listen to the Queen Dowager's murmurs, read the true moves hidden inside her parables, deflect the petitions and probes that swarm the villa, and work out your own part in all this. Are you the Queen Dowager's piece, her apprentice, or can you become her equal across the board? When the great match that will shake the court finally begins, it is you who carries the final move. Including the choice of whether to make it at all.