The Black Gate Board Game, an attempt to adapt Ultima 7 as a board game, first came to light in July of 2013. For a while, there was a lot of promise in the project; Colby Young (the designer) posted fairly regular updates about it. A few months later, with some help from his friend Gord Moran, Colby even began working on a Unity-based version of the game, as a way of addressing issues surrounding how to distribute the game when and if it was finished.

The board game was put on indefinite hold in February of 2014 (along with the Unity version). Some months later, Colby and Gord (and a few others) re-emerged as IronOak Games, and announced that the fledgling company’s first game would be called For The King. For The King is now in the middle of a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign; it has raised over $90,000 CAD (from a base goal of just $40,000 CAD) to support its development, succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of its small development team.

In this episode of Spam Spam Spam Humbug, then, I sat down with Colby and Gord, and we talked about how For The King came to be, how the transition between The Black Gate Board Game and For The King actually happened, and what the future holds for IronOak’s inaugural title.

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Full Disclosure: I’m a backer of For The King on Kickstarter.