Hello, delicious friends! Now that Whitsun is over, the first update to Hearts' Game will be out soon. In fact, this Thursday, May 25th.

Hearts’ Game, released in April, is a new activity that will expand and change over the course of the year. It is free for all players, and accessible once you have obtained a Person of Some Importance specialisation and raised your Dangerous past 200.

Because this update includes lots of changes to Hearts' Game, we’ll be ending runs and pushing players out of the activity when the update starts at noon UTC, so plan to end your runs before that accordingly. Expect the activity to be briefly locked for maintenance after this period, and for the new season to be available to play around 1PM UTC. Fallen London as a whole will not be going down for maintenance during this time.

The Season of Excess brings four new accomplices to the game, expanding the total roster to eleven. It also comes with a lot of tweaks and improvements to the overall game:

In season 1, Elusiveness of your Target acted both as the clock in the activity and as a gradual reduction of how fast the player made progress, demanding that the player use more and more powerful branches as each round went on. We’ve found that we want to decouple those two things, so season 2 brings a new quality, Poison Tolerance of your Target, that gradually reduces how fast you make progress; this quality increases more slowly than Elusiveness.
Poisonous Preparations are no longer a pyramid, for ease of planning and understanding when you can play certain cards, and to give us more granularity when requiring Preparations on branches.
Numbers have been tweaked across the board, to account for these changes. A lot fewer branches have die rolls to determine how much progress they make (we find that the game already had enough variance without these, for the most part). This update puts branches on a very ‘flat’ power level; we expect that for season 3, we’ll make more pointed adjustments to individual cards or accomplices.
There will be a new lower-value option to exchange exploits for items at the Page of Quills.

One of the things left hanging since season one was the availability of vanity rewards for winning games or runs. Here’s how we’re splitting these:

If you won at least one round over the course of Season One, you’ll get a bronze medal;
If you won at least seven rounds (across any number of runs), you’ll get a silver medal;
If you got at least one trophy – that is, if you won at least seven rounds in one run – you’ll get a gold medal.

We expect to keep these thresholds the same going forward.

Good luck in the Season of Excess; we look forward to seeing how you tackle the new accomplices and changed mechanics.