I copied Inselkampf to start. Here's what I've added since.
TL;DR: Inselnova started as a copy of Inselkampf and has gone its own direction. A handful of things have come in that aren’t in the original: a bazaar, coins, council affairs, the Black Tide, a church with gods and a new resource called lumen, and a guildhall. Each came from a specific problem in the early or mid game. A few are still half-formed and waiting for the lore to claim them. Most of what’s interesting about the game now lives in the additions, not the core remake.
The starting point
Inselnova started as a copy of Inselkampf. Same loop. Build, raid, defend, queue, log out. I knew the game. I wanted to see what it looked like with 25 years of better tooling under it.
That hasn’t really been true for a while. A handful of things have come in since that aren’t in the original, and each one came from a problem I bumped into rather than a roadmap I planned. The interesting parts of the game right now live in the additions.
Bazaar
The first thing I added was a marketplace. The early game in the original was a few minutes long. You’d log in, queue a build, log out. There wasn’t much else to do until you’d levelled up enough to access more. That worked when the audience accepted it. It doesn’t really work now.
The bazaar gives players something to do every time they log in, even on day one. Not a slot machine. A real player-driven market. Stone, lumber, gold, coins, ships. If nobody’s selling, there’s nothing to buy. That’s the catch and also the point.
A note on what I’m not doing. Some IK-inspired games and clones have added build queues. You queue up multiple jobs and they run one after another while you’re offline. I’m avoiding that. If a queue ever comes in, it has to be earned, and probably can’t be always on. Otherwise the game becomes an automatic cookie clicker. I want people to put effort in. Effort is what creates a game economy. The bazaar gives you something to do without removing the friction that makes effort matter.
Coins
I can’t remember whether coins or the bazaar came first. They’re tied at the hip. The original had stone, lumber and gold. I knew every modern game has some kind of currency, so I threw it in. It fitted neatly with the bazaar. Coins are how you buy bazaar items.
The problem I’m still sitting on is the coin sink. Players at a certain mid-game point have too many coins. There’s only really one place to spend them. I’ve spent time with ChatGPT trying to figure out where coins fit conceptually, what they represent in the world. ChatGPT keeps suggesting power and identity, which sound right, but no strong sink has fallen out of those conversations yet.
Coins are an honest example of “I added this because it felt obvious, and now I have to figure out what it means.” That happens.
Council affairs
The original Inselkampf was a building queue and a war machine. There was no narrative layer. Inselnova has council affairs.
You’re running a town. Every so often a village elder walks in with a problem. A mime who won’t leave the square. A barber who appears to be cursed. Boundary stones being moved at night. You read the dispatch, pick from two to four choices, and the outcome plays out in a written reply.
The choices are usually weighted. One pragmatic, one benevolent, one risky. The risky one is openly a gamble, and the wording makes that clear so nobody’s being tricked into a coin flip. Here’s the gamble option from a real affair, the one about an actual mime who has been mimicking the village shoemaker’s limp:
Wager a council member’s dignity against him. Have a council member silently mirror everything the mime does until someone breaks. If council breaks first, the mime wins the square forever. If the mime breaks, the legend is yours.
Whichever way it goes, you get a written report back. If the mime cracks first, your steward becomes a folk hero and the shoemaker buys him a drink. If your steward cracks first, the mime is still there, performing a new piece called “The Steward’s Moment of Weakness.”
Affairs do most of the storytelling work in the game. They’re how the world gets a voice. The choices also quietly shape what kind of town you’re running over time, so the way you handle the small stuff matters in the long run.
This is the addition I’m most pleased with so far.
The Black Tide
The original Inselkampf had dead accounts and a “natural disaster” event that would clear them out. I felt that was weak. I wanted some character.
I also had a related problem. Players were taking lots of islands and just leaving them. So I added island neglect. The island goes grey on the map. Unrest rises. Unrest causes unhappiness. Unhappiness drops defences and attack values. Recovering happiness takes hours. The island moves through stages, ending in forsaken.
Then the Black Tide. An NPC faction takes over forsaken islands and starts attacking the neighbours. The world cleans itself. Active players get someone to attack, which is useful when the rest of the map is in a holding pattern. There’s a separate scoreboard for Black Tide kills. People feel like they’re helping the world fight a common enemy.
And the Black Tide raises questions. Who are they? Where are they from? Why this island? I don’t have full answers yet. I have hints, and I’ll fill them in as the lore develops. I’m leaving the gaps on purpose. A clean-up event with a face on it is far more interesting than a clean-up event without one.
The other thing the Black Tide does is let me say something definite. There will never be a world reset in Inselnova. The Black Tide is the alternative. We can keep the world growing forever, kill off dead accounts as we go, and not throw away anyone’s history.
Church, gods, and lumen
Two backlog items had been bothering me for a while.
First, when players get big, how does anyone touch them? Second, my watchtower tells me I’m about to be attacked, but the game gives me no mechanic to actually prepare. I’d started building an interception system for the second one. It didn’t feel right and it was getting complicated. Shelved.
Separately, I had schools. Originally I thought schools were a clever addition. Another building. Another lever. In practice they were a third dial to balance alongside housing and food, with no real benefit to the player. An annoyance, not a feature.
I spent a drive picking up my daughter on ChatGPT voice mode, exploring how to replace schools with something better. Turns out that in the 1200s, schools didn’t really exist. Most learning happened in the church. From there it developed. Make gods. Use magical powers to protect yourself before a raid lands. If the Black Tide is grinding you down, buff your attack to break their defences. That covers both backlog items in the same mechanic.
I also wanted a new resource. Something players need and want. Hard to build up. Only usable a few times a week. The other resources get too easy at mid-game, and an easy resource carries no story weight. So the gods came with their own resource. Lumen. Generated at a shrine. Slow to accumulate. Limited burn rate. The buff list grows over time.
It’s still very new. The number of things lumen can do is endless. Building speed buffs. Defence boosts. Counter-spy. Raid range. Each of these is a small feature, and each one connects to something the player already cares about.
I want a black market for lumen too. People trading it under the table, alliances stockpiling it before a war. That’s a thing that should exist in this game.
Guildhall
The guildhall came in as an attempted coin sink. It’s a marketplace for personalisation and identity. You can decorate your player name, post messages on the world ticker, send anonymous letters to other players. All paid in coins.
It’s not really a coin sink. The volume is too low. People will buy a name decoration once and then stop. The coin problem is still open. The guildhall earns its place anyway, because it’s where players express themselves to the rest of the world, and that’s worth a building on its own.
Planting seeds
A pattern runs through all of these. I’ve added several things without knowing exactly what they’ll mean later. Players ask “I’ve got this thing, what does it do?” Sometimes I honestly don’t know. I’m planting a seed, mostly with myself. Gut feeling it’s a good idea. Trusting that a mechanic will come along that gives it meaning.
This has already happened twice. The Black Tide started as a way to clean up dead accounts. The lore is now claiming it as something bigger. Lumen started as “we need a scarce resource.” It’s becoming the currency of magical favour. In both cases the seed went in before I knew what would grow from it.
The lore is the binder. As long as a new mechanic has a hook the world can grab onto, future me will figure out what it means.
What I won’t do
A short list of rules that have crystallised from doing all this:
- No world resets, ever. The Black Tide handles dead accounts. The world keeps growing.
- No always-on queues. If queueing comes in, it has to be earned and conditional. Probably tied to a building or a resource. Cookie-clicker mode is not the goal.
- A new mechanic has to fit somewhere. Not just sit next to the rest of the game. Bazaar needs coins. Coins need a sink. Gods need lumen. Lumen needs scarcity. Black Tide needs neglect. The chain is the design.
Where this leaves the game
Inselnova still loops the same way the original did at its core. Build, raid, defend, log back in, do it again. The shape underneath is the same. But the things that make a session feel like a session now mostly come from the additions. The marketplace gives you something to do in the early game. Council affairs give the world a voice. Lumen gives you something to plan for in the mid game. The Black Tide gives you something to push back against when there’s no one else to fight. The guildhall gives you somewhere to be a person, not just a player.
None of this was on the roadmap when I started. All of it will probably be roughly there in a year. I’ll keep planting seeds for the things I don’t yet understand and trust the lore to catch up.
Inselnova is a free browser strategy game. Play here.
