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Immortal Barons

Immortal Barons is a turn-based strategy game for the terminal. You rule a barony in a ruined, post-apocalyptic world. You buy land, feed your people, build an army, and fight rival empires. The goal is to have the highest net worth when the turns run out, or to conquer everyone else.

The game is written in Go. It is an independent remake, inspired by the 1990s BBS door game Barren Realms Elite. See Heritage below.

Early release. The game is playable and inter-BBS (IBBS) league play works, but it is not finished: some game values are still being balanced, and a league has so far only been run between boards belonging to one operator.

Status

Immortal Barons is a persistent, multi-user BBS door game: each caller has a lasting empire in one shared world; you play your turns, and other barons (and any AI) act on their own turns. The game runs locally or as a native BBS door.

The core game is playable — economy, military and war, covert operations, diplomacy, and messaging all work. Leagues and inter-BBS play are built as well: boards trade packets, and barons attack, message, and buy from an ally's market across planets. That has been run between two boards on one machine; a league spread across boards run by different sysops has not been tried yet.

Balance is the unfinished part. The values read from the original's own program — region income, unit costs, industrial output, the crown tax — now match it, but the rest are still being tuned, so parts of the game may be too easy or too hard.

Learn more, follow progress, or get involved:

We strongly recommend reading the FAQ first.

Running

The game plays locally in your terminal or as a native BBS door. Once you have the immortal-barons binary — download it (see below) or build it from source — play locally:

./immortal-barons -local

On Windows the binary is immortal-barons.exe. Run it as immortal-barons -local from Command Prompt, or ./immortal-barons -local from PowerShell. From a source checkout you can also run it without building first with go run ./cmd/immortal-barons -local.

Run immortal-barons -help (or -h) to see all the command-line options; the Command Reference explains every option in one place. To run the game as a native BBS door instead, see "Running as a BBS door" below.

Download

Tagged releases and development snapshots are on the releases page. Builds are provided for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

See Download for which file to pick, and what to expect the first time you run it.

This repository is also a Homebrew tap, for macOS and Linuxbrew. See Download for how to install from it.

To build from source instead, see below.

Build

You only need this to build from source; if you downloaded a binary above, skip it. To build, you need Go 1.26 or newer. The game builds anywhere Go does — Linux, macOS, Windows, and the BSDs (DOS is not supported).

To install Go, download an official installer or tarball from https://go.dev/doc/install. That same page also has the step-by-step install instructions for Windows, macOS, Linux, and the BSDs, and always offers a current version. On macOS you can also run brew install go; on any Linux with snap (preinstalled on Ubuntu), snap install go --classic tracks a current Go too. On Linux and the BSDs the package manager's Go is usually called go or golang (for example go on Arch, Alpine, and FreeBSD; golang on Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora). A distro's package can be older than 1.26, though — if it is, use the official tarball.

go build ./cmd/immortal-barons ./cmd/barons-ftn

This produces the immortal-barons game and the optional barons-ftn inter-BBS transport helper. See "Running" above to start the game; the Door Setup guide explains the helper.

Character set

See the Character Set guide for how to choose between CP437 and UTF-8.

Running as a BBS door

Immortal Barons can run as a native door under BBS software on any platform Go supports. Callers share one persistent world, each empire saved between calls and keyed by its BBS handle, and several nodes can play at the same time.

The Door Setup guide covers registering the door, the dropfile, daily maintenance (immortal-barons -maint) and starting a fresh game (immortal-barons -reset). Inter-BBS Leagues covers linking your board to others.

How to play

See the player's guide.

Heritage

Immortal Barons is a tribute to Barren Realms Elite, created by Mehul Patel and now owned by John Dailey Software. This project shares that game's ideas and feel, but it does not use any of its code, text, or artwork. Game rules and mechanics are not covered by copyright, so this is a fresh implementation of the concept. It is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the current or past owner(s) of Barren Realms Elite.

Tools

Immortal Barons is made with these open-source tools:

  • The title banner uses the "ANSI Shadow" FIGlet font, rendered with figlet (a Go version of the classic tool).
  • ANSI art is previewed by rendering it to a PNG image: ansilove for 16-color CP437 pieces, and textimg for 256-color / UTF-8 art like the title splash.
  • The documentation is translated with po4a.

License

Free software under the MIT License.