Spam Spam Spam Humbug 22 – For The King
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The Black Gate Board Game, an attempt to adapt Ultima 7 as a board game, first came to light in July of 2013. Amusingly, for my part in it, it was a chance conversation at a family party (Easter dinner, I suspect) that got the ball rolling. I had been showing off something Ultima-related on my phone (possibly Ultima Forever) to my wife’s cousin Troy, and he mentioned that a friend of his out in Vancouver had been working on adapting Ultima 7: The Black Gate as a board game.
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. Using improved versions of many of the same mechanics that were developed for The Black Gate Board Game, Colby and his team have put together a very promising-looking single-player/co-op multiplayer title with a very original — almost board-game-like — visual aesthetic. And if you look past its (very pretty) exterior, you’ll find little cues taken from the Ultima games.
For 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.
* Oh, and if you want, you can grab a PDF copy of the main board — the map of Britannia — from The Black Gate Board Game. It’s gorgeous.
Community & Patronage
As always, this episode of Spam Spam Spam Humbug is brought to you by our Patreon backers; thank you to everyone who supports Spam Spam Spam Humbug and the Ultima Codex by that means. And, as always, a hearty thank you to our co-producers: Seth, Goldenflame, Dominik, Violation, Helgraf, Gronkh, Pascal, and Thorwan.
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Music
Teaser Trailer Score, from the For The King soundtrack
The Queen’s Decree, from the For The King soundtrack
Spam Spam Spam Humbug sits down with Colby Young and Gord Moran of IronOak Games to discuss For The King, and its beginnings in The Black Gate Board Game.