A play-by-email strategy & world-building game
Game-master-driven · AI-supported · played by email, one turn a week
The waters came, the empires drowned, and the old order is gone. Out of that ruin, one city still stands — and it is yours to rule. Each week you write a letter; a real game master, with an AI clerk at his side, weaves every ruler's letter into a single living world and writes you back.
What this is
A real person reads what you write and answers it. You rule one city-state that survived the Flood, in a region where every other realm collapsed. What you build from it — its culture, ambitions, enemies and legends — is genuinely yours, and it reshapes the shared world around you.
Not a program. A person reads your letters, judges your schemes, and rules on what happens. The AI is a tireless clerk and co-author behind the scenes — it proposes; the game master decides. Nothing reaches you until a human has reviewed and approved it.
A turn can be a single sentence or a five-page despatch. Light weeks and deep weeks both work. The game rewards thinking, imagination and good ideas — not reflexes — and it flexes to the life you actually have.
You invent your ruler, your history, your faith, your government — all free. The Game Master places you on the map to fit who you are, and from Year 1 onward the history of the world is written by the people who live in it.
The system revives a play-by-mail game run for years by post, set in the world of Isrogant — developed over many years, with books in German and an English edition in preparation. A serious, carefully-run project for players who want one.
Real conversations, real creativity, a living world — and a game master who is genuinely paying attention.
The worlds
Each game runs on its own freshly-made continent — a different land, recognisably the same world. There are six thrones to a world. When they are filled, the world closes to new rulers.
The first chronicle — the pilot that proved the system, played free with a hand-picked circle. Its six thrones are taken and its history is already being written, turn by turn.
A new continent, generated fresh from the same lore. Six thrones, gathering now — the first chronicle anyone may apply to join. Players are placed once the world is full and each ruler has described their realm.
More worlds will open as these fill. Each is its own self-contained chronicle.
The rhythm
One turn is one week — and one week passes in the world for every turn you play. The cycle is simple, and it repeats.
Through the week, before the deadline, you email what your ruler intends — orders, plans, diplomacy, trade, war, schemes, festivals, journeys — at whatever length suits you.
The Game Master gathers every letter, adds the wider world's events, and resolves the whole week at once with the AI's help — then reviews and approves everything before it goes out.
A private account of how your orders played out — what succeeded, what failed, what you learned — plus the public newspaper, the Edö Messenger, full of report, rumour and bias. Often a new map arrives too.
You only ever learn what your ruler could plausibly know. News arrives late or distorted; spies lie. Read between the lines, write your next letter, and the cycle turns again.