Create beautiful pots and use them to smash your friends to pieces in Double Fine's new 'online multiplayer pottery party brawler'

Kiln - Official Announce Trailer - YouTube

According to Tim Schafer, every so often Double Fine Productions will hit the pause button on its current project and spend two weeks developing something new based on a pitch from members of its team.

Forgetting about its main game and focusing on something different for a bit is called "Amnesia Fortnight" and this process has resulted in games like Costume Quest in 2011 and Stacking in 2012—and now, in 2026, a new game called Kiln.

Kiln is an "online multiplayer pottery party brawler" where you first shape a teapot, vase, jug, mug, chalice, or bowl at a potter's wheel, then sprout legs and charge into team-based battle against other players. The goal is to smash your opponents and extinguish their massive kiln by dousing it with water—and you can carry that water because you're a cup or a bowl, remember?

Depending on what shape you've created at the potter's wheel, you'll have different movesets and special abilities. Maybe you can run around with corn kernels in your pot and pop them for an explosive attack or fire a projectile out of your head like a cannon. If you're round you can roll and if you crafted a small pot you'll able to slip through tiny openings in the map. The strategy begins long before the match, when you use you imagination on a lump of clay.

After a match you can collect your XP and spend the chips you earned to buy art supplies for creating and decorating new pieces of pottery in a multiplayer lobby. It all looks pretty neat to me, and it appears Double Fine put just as much time into the pottery crafting system as the brawling.

Kiln is coming in spring of 2026. Here's more info on Xbox Wire.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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