Lucifuge Dragon continues to work on — and play-test — his board game implementation of Ultima 7: The Black Gate. The most recent change to the game, it would seem, is the addition of a certain dungeon which…didn’t appear in the computer game:

The Black Gate is evolving into a very challenging game. Typically, once a fortnight, I aim to get a full game in to test out new or updated mechanics and other gameplay elements to further polish. Usually it only works out to be once a month when we venture into Britannia but when it does happen, it’s a very fun, genuinely difficult experience. Maybe it’s too hard right now, tough to say really. Next time I am going to get new people to play it so that I can watch it closely.

After playing The Black Gate nearly a dozen times, I still have yet to get tired of it even though we have been getting our butts kicked recently. The latest additions, which were tested this play through, are Poison Terrain markers for the over world and none other than the addition of Dungeon Doom! This was originally planned to be an “expansion”, if you will, to the core game adding an additional dungeon for players to explore. I decided to include it as part of the core mostly because I wanted to add an eighth dungeon to go with the eight virtues, eight towns, eight moongates and so forth.

Dungeon Doom is a pretty terrible place but great treasure awaits within, it’s sole purpose is to lure foolish adventurers to within it’s depths. It features a unique set of extremely difficult enemies, unique items and generally much more treasure to be had in comparison to the other dungeons. It can only be discovered via the Special Encounters so there really is no guarantee it will even surface each playthrough. When it does pop up…well…it’s up to you if you want to go in. As luck would have it, we found the fabled Dungeon Doom. We’ll get to that later.

This particular playthrough didn’t end well, however:

Around this point the Guardian was sitting at the 7th spot which is really bad news. Smith the Horse was kind enough to point out the location of a generator but it just wasn’t enough. We really needed the Alagner’s Notebook quest or else to destroy the Tetrahedron Generator in Shame. We were caught between a rock and a hard place and decided we needed to avoid encounters at all costs. We did our best to bounce from town to town, spending money on inns and only going directly into dungeons. We were in the later stages of the encounter deck and I knew that the Fellowship Assassins would be looking for us soon.

At some point we drew yet another Armageddon card pushing the Guardian right to the doorstep. We then reflected on some bad decisions and what we should have done differently which included chasing the Black Sword during a bad time in the game. Naturally everything was my fault since I was the only who was dieing and pulling the Armageddon cards. We were scared to move and so we did all we could. Gord had a quest to go complete so he lent me Spark, who was packing a heavy crossbow with magic bolts. Before he departed he left me with some sage-like advice: “Go dungeon diving.”

So, I went dungeon diving…and perished. That was when everything went red and I flipped the table.

But then, it’s probably a good thing that the game is as challenging as this, isn’t it?

As well, the Unity version of the game seems to be progressing nicely: network play has been (partially) implemented!

I’ve made the first steps in networking the game, currently the game piece positions are syncing nicely via network. A few nights ago I connected 3 clients together and it was working not too bad. There is a lot of work to be done just on this alone and I may have hit my first roadblock. I might have to go back to scripting game mechanics in order to keep making significant strides and deal with this a bit later.