Lucifuge Dragon’s most recent update to the Sixth Circle website gives us a look at just how things can go wrong, for the party and for Britannia, in his board game adaptation of Ultima 7: The Black Gate:

We kicked it off in our respective towns and had a pretty strong start. We teamed up in a few dungeons, drew a few solid quests and made a lot of gold. Right away we set our goal: let’s get a boat. Gord/Iolo had most of our money at the beginning as we fell into a good rhythm of myself landing the initial blow on enemies and he’d drop them with his crossbow, earning the gold and items. That’s fine, we were a team. He spent the majority of the game with the Justice virtue while I played it safe and took Honor.

A ship deed costs 1500 gold pieces. That’s a lot of gold, especially early in the game but we were well on our way within 30 minutes of starting. We played through the first level of Dungeon Destard and we were feeling pretty confident. I wisely said “Let’s just take a peak at the Level 2 card, it could be a treasure chest.” It wasn’t. It was a terrible Daemon. I ran for town. Iolo? Not so much, he tripped over his own feet and proceeded to burn alive in fiery daemon-magic, and was reduced to a charred corpse. All that gold? Gone.

It gets worse from there.

However, he did also make a few changes to the game’s mechanics since the last time we heard from him:

Special Encounters is a new deck, it doesn’t feature any new types of cards but this is now the deck that players draw from when anything out of the ordinary is discovered to keep randomness dispersed through out the over world. This worked fantastically and now gives me a lot of control on their occurrence! I really feel good about the encounters now and the difficulty scaling of the game.

It sounds like the game is maturing nicely! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t wait to play it myself some day, in whatever form it eventually gets released in.