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 but not finished. Game values are still being balanced, and live inter-BBS (IBBS) play is not ready yet.
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 already playable — economy, military and war, covert operations, diplomacy, and messaging all work, but the game is not yet balanced. Many values do not match BRE's yet, so parts of the game are far too easy or too hard. Larger features, such as leagues and live inter-BBS play, are still to come.
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 are on the releases page.
Development snapshots are also available. Snapshots are rebuilt automatically from the latest source, so they change often and may be less stable than a tagged release. Get them from the snapshot release.
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¶
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
This produces the immortal-barons binary; see "Running" above to start it.
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 the details: registering the door, the dropfile, daily maintenance
(immortal-barons -maint), the node list, inter-BBS play, and starting a fresh
game (immortal-barons -reset).
Running in a browser (experimental)¶
Immortal Barons also has an experimental browser front-end (immortal-barons-web),
separate from the BBS door.
Note its security review status: the server code was written mostly by an AI language model, and nobody who works in server security has reviewed it. Putting it on a public address exposes code whose security has never been checked by a qualified person. You may choose to run it on your own computer or on your local network, but even that may be unsafe.
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¶
See the player's guide.
Design¶
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 (-localfor local play)internal/session— the input/output abstractioninternal/ansi— terminal color and screen codesinternal/menu— the menu engine and the menu treeinternal/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¶
Free software under the MIT License.