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 work in progress. Immortal Barons is not ready for real play-testing or inter-BBS (IBBS) play yet. Mechanics are still changing.

Status¶

In development — not yet released. 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.

Works now:

Full menu system with single-key commands
Persistent shared world: your empire is saved between calls, keyed by your BBS handle; one player at a time (exclusive lock); a daily maintenance step
Per-turn economy (idle empires stagnate); turns-per-day and new-realm protection
Economy: buy and sell land at a rising market price, buy food, recruit troopers, build jets/turrets/tanks/carriers, recruit covert agents
Bank: deposit, withdraw, take a loan, repay, invest (about 1%/turn)
War: conventional attack (offense vs. defense), plus nuclear, chemical, and biological strikes and pirate raids
Covert ops (agent-count decides success): spy for intel, sabotage, and strikes on the enemy's intelligence, airbases, food stores, and HeadQuarters
Region types (coastal, mountain, desert, river, agricultural, urban, industrial, technology) and a food market
Diplomacy: typed treaties (defense, trade, intelligence) with their effects
Sysop configuration editor
Industry: set production percentages per unit, or specialize (permanent)
Messages: player-to-player mail with a multi-line editor, and a planetary bulletin
A planetary news feed: battles, nuclear/chemical/biological strikes, pirate raids, and tax riots are broadcast to everyone
Write Macros: record a Ctrl-key to replay a sequence of keystrokes
Localization: menus, prompts, and the help database render in the caller's language (English, German, and Russian so far)
"While you were away" event log for asynchronous play
Scores and net worth

Planned (not built yet):

Leagues that reset on a timer and crown a winner
The Quick Strike and Extended Battle attack variants
Inter-BBS (IBBS) live play (the packet exchange — scores, news, and group attacks — works and is tested; validation under real BBS software is still pending)

Download¶

The first stable version is not released yet. Until it is, only development snapshots are available. Snapshots are rebuilt automatically from the latest source, so they change often and are not stable. Get them from the snapshot release. Once the first version is out, stable releases will appear on the releases page.

Builds are provided for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), Linux (x86-64 and ARM64), and macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon). The binaries are not signed, so Windows may show a SmartScreen warning the first time you run one.

To build from source instead, see below.

Build and run¶

You need Go 1.26 or newer. The game builds and runs anywhere Go does — Linux, macOS, Windows, and the BSDs (DOS is not supported). It plays locally or as a native BBS door.

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
./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.

Or run it directly:

go run ./cmd/immortal-barons -local

Running as a BBS door¶

Immortal Barons can run as a native door under BBS software on any platform Go supports. The BBS writes a dropfile (DOOR32.SYS or DOOR.SYS) when a caller starts the door, and the caller shares one persistent world with everyone else on the board — each empire is saved between calls, keyed by its BBS handle.

Registering the door, the dropfile, daily maintenance (immortal-barons -maint), the node list, inter-BBS play, and starting a fresh game (immortal-barons -reset) are all covered in the Door Setup guide.

Running in a browser (experimental)¶

Immortal Barons also has an experimental browser front-end (immortal-barons-web), separate from the BBS door. See the Web Server Guide for how to build and run it, how players are tracked, the full list of options, and why its world is separate from a BBS door's world.

How to play¶

The game uses single keypresses — you do not press Enter to choose a menu item. See the player's guide for the menus, the controls, and strategy.

Design¶

The design notes are in docs/superpowers/specs/.

The code is split so that the game logic does not know how it is shown to the player. The engine only reads keypresses from, and writes text to, a Session. This makes it possible to add a BBS-door front-end and a web front-end later without changing the game rules.

cmd/immortal-barons — the door and local terminal front-end (-local for local play)
internal/session — the input/output abstraction
internal/ansi — terminal color and screen codes
internal/menu — the menu engine and the menu tree
internal/game — the world, economy, turn engine, and combat

Heritage¶

Immortal Barons is a tribute to Barren Realms Elite, created by Mehul Patel and later maintained by John Dailey. 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, or endorsed by, the original authors.

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¶

Released into the public domain under the Unlicense.