Let’s look at school. Let’s assume that your leader sees the school on the horizon…

You can connect to this location with road or rails and it will be a part of yours State. In this situation you will be given 1 human resource every turn. You have the school, you have many kids, you have cheap workers!

You can have a deal with the school. You don’t spend resources to build a road, but you only sign a deal. This is the blue space on the card. It gives you 1 human resource as well in every turn. The school will send you a kid to work every month! (so why put it as location if it is the same as a deal? I will talk about that later on.)

You can invade the school. You don’t want to build the school. You don’t need a kid to work every turn. You just need many of them now! This is the red space on the card. It gives you 3 human resources in a moment, right now! But then you will receive nothing. School is burnt, destroyed, no more kids ever.

Piece of cake, isn’t it?

One School, three different ways of playing the card. Quite easy to understand what is going on, right? Let’s take a look at another card! You look around, and you find a Police Station on the horizon…

When you connect to it via some roads and you put it in your State as a building, you will receive a special action – it changes a gun into Victory Points. It is easy to understand. You have the police. Every time you use a gun, you gain respect all around you. You receive Victory Points which represents fame, respect…

Blue space? If you have a deal with the Police, they will provide you help and protection. You will be given one gun resource every round.

Red space? If you invade the Police station, you will gain many gun resources (you take guns and armor from the armory) and what is more, you gain one Victory Point. You invaded Police! Man, that rocks! Your fame raise…

Easy to understand? Easy to imagine? Different possibilities, choices?

Let’s look again, other card… There is a Pub. Do you want to Invade it? Have a Deal with it? Have it as a Location in your State?

These symbols are cards. So you can Invade Pub, interrogate people before you kill them, and have 3 new cards (red space). New cards = new locations to find on the horizon. These customers from Pub had told you – before you killed them – what was interesting near the pub. You got information. You got 3 new cards.

Blue space is special skill that let you have more choices during drawing cards in a future. You know people in Pub, you have a Deal with them, you exchange information about places around…

White (main) part of the card? You gain one card every turn. You have the Pub. You have place where gossip and information can be found every day.

So here is the first, brief explanation of fundament of the 51st State. In a few days I will post another – more deep – presentation of the rules.

If you have any questions – feel free. Happy to answer!

I had a whole deck of cards introducing events. I did write about them in one of the articles on Stronghold. Tens of cards with events like a downpour, a support of eastern troops, a riot in the camp. I had an expansion to make, so they needed another look to see what the problem was and whether it could be solved. These events would bring new excitement to the game.

I had ideas for new heroes, who could replace the veterans – “Boromir” and “Aragorn”. There are ten major kingdoms in the universe of Monastyr. One hero from Agaria, and one from Ragada made their appearance in Stronghold. Now that an expansion was in the workings, I had a chance to introduce another eight heroes, coming from the remaining nations of Monastyr.

Rules of hunger were in their infancy – they were something Salou would try talking me into during the tens of test matches. Eventually I decided against it, I thought it would complicate the game too much. And since the expansion would be purchased by players who already knew the main game, I felt I could allow myself to introduce more complicated rules now. So I took out the hunger rules from the archives.

At a relatively late point of the creation process the commanders of the Invader’s army were also kicked out of the main Stronghold game. In the game you know, phase six is Dispatch. In the version of the game which I tested for a few weeks, the phase six card was similar to the phase 2-4 cards – it had various actions, depending on the commander drawn at the beginning of the game. There were six different commanders, and the player would draw two, and eventually pick one of the two before the game. There were aggressive commanders (granting bigger dispatches), defensive commanders (smaller dispatches, better protection from archers’ fire), commanders with a stratagem, commanders with high camp discipline, and others.

A similar case was the issue of Resources – the first of the phase cards. At some point there were various cards saying where the action takes place. There was a lakeside area, where the player, in addition to wood, received fish (related to the hunger rules). There were dense forests (giving more wood), and quarries (giving stone for improved catapult fire)…

I removed all of it when we saw that Stronghold is hellishly complicated already and needs simplifying, because it started resembling a simulation that the testers couldn’t grasp.

I was about to make an expansion, and so a chance appeared to give all those discarded ideas a second look and pick the useful ones.

I also had a few new ideas which came into existence after the work on Stronghold had been finished. I wanted to add orc heroes, Aragorn and Boromir’s counterparts on the Invader’s side. Placed on ramparts they would influence combat on adjacent wall sections.

There’s a big box full of notes regarding Stronghold. As big as the Stronghold box itself, with piles of paper written in small print, and tens of different ideas and versions. When I sat down to make the expansion I took it all out and started sifting through it in search for the best concepts.

Today, after months of work on the Stronghold Undead, I have bad news for you. If you liked any of the above mentioned ideas or found them interesting, then unfortunately you won’t find them in the expansion. I have binned everything I wrote about here. Again.

I can’t believe it myself.

We are preparing special gift for all Neuroshima HEX fans – we will print limited edition of fan armies – and we will bring few copies to Essen, so stay tuned!