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 and inter-BBS (IBBS) league play works, but it is not finished: some game values are still being balanced, and a league has so far only been run between boards belonging to one operator.
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 playable — economy, military and war, covert operations, diplomacy, and messaging all work. Leagues and inter-BBS play are built as well: boards trade packets, and barons attack, message, and buy from an ally's market across planets. That has been run between two boards on one machine; a league spread across boards run by different sysops has not been tried yet.
Balance is the unfinished part. The values read from the original's own program — region income, unit costs, industrial output, the crown tax — now match it, but the rest are still being tuned, so parts of the game may be too easy or too hard.
Learn more, follow progress, or get involved:
We strongly recommend reading the FAQ first.
You do not need to download or install the game to play it. It runs on the board or the server you connect to. You can play on a BBS, or over SSH.
Some boards run Immortal Barons as a door game. Connect with your usual BBS client. Boards hosting Immortal Barons lists them, and is where you can list your own board.
A public server runs the game over SSH. It signs you in with an SSH key, not a password. Your existing key works. If you do not have one, make one first:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519
Press Enter when it asks where to save the key. ssh looks for the key under that
default name. If you save it somewhere else, name it when you connect, with
-i ~/.ssh/yourkey.
Then connect:
ssh -p 2222 yourname@85.119.83.118
Use any name you like. That name is your account on the server. The first time you play, the game asks you to name your realm, and that is the name other barons see.
The first time you connect, the server saves the key you used and links it to the name you chose. After that, only that key can log in under that name.
To avoid typing the address, port, name and key each time, put them in your SSH config file:
| File | System |
|---|---|
~/.ssh/config |
Linux, macOS and the BSDs |
C:\Users\<you>\.ssh\config |
Windows |
Add this to it:
Host barons
HostName 85.119.83.118
Port 2222
User yourname
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
Change the IdentityFile line if your key has another name. Then connect with
ssh barons.
If you prefer a graphical client, set the host to 85.119.83.118, the port to
2222, and the user name to the name you want.
PuTTY lets you point it at a key file.
SyncTERM keeps a key of its own and uses it for
you, so there is no file to choose.
Keep your key. The server ties your name to the first key it sees, so a new key means a new name and a new realm.
The server runs DeuceGate, which starts the game as soon as you log in.
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.
Tagged releases and development snapshots are on the releases page. Builds are provided for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
See Download for which file to pick, and what to expect the first time you run it.
This repository is also a Homebrew tap, for macOS and Linuxbrew. See Download for how to install from it.
To build from source instead, see below.
You need Go 1.26 or newer. The game builds anywhere Go does — Linux, macOS, Windows, and the BSDs.
Install Go from https://go.dev/doc/install, which has current instructions for every platform. Your package manager may have Go as well, but check the version first: some distributions ship one older than 1.26.
go build ./cmd/immortal-barons ./cmd/barons-ftn
This produces the immortal-barons game and the optional barons-ftn inter-BBS
transport helper. See "Running" above to start the game; the
FTN Transport guide
explains the helper.
See the Character Set guide for how to choose between CP437 and UTF-8.
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 registering the door, the dropfile, daily maintenance
(immortal-barons -maint) and starting a fresh game (immortal-barons -reset).
Inter-BBS Leagues
covers linking your board to others.
See the player's guide.
Immortal Barons is a tribute to Barren Realms Elite, created by Mehul Patel and now owned by John Dailey Software. 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, nor endorsed by, the current or past owner(s) of Barren Realms Elite.
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.
Free software under the MIT License.