What my friend BigChris changed in Inselnova in 206 days

TL;DR: BigChris is a friend of mine, and he was the third player into Founders World, the main world of this persistent world browser strategy game. On his second day he found a way to cheese it and went to number one. For the next few months he lost a lot of fights, told me the battle reports were upside down, and spent the first few weeks finding bugs for me. Then he slowly stopped logging in, and in late September, two weeks after his last visit, the game removed him from the world.

He was the third player in

Founders World opened at the end of February. I joined it first, then my daughter, then Aubrius, someone I’d messaged on Reddit after they mentioned the original Inselkampf. Chris joined a few days later, the third player in after me. I hadn’t planned on inviting friends early, because a random person is your first real traction and a friend will be too polite. Chris was the one exception. He’s a good friend, and he’s been in the game since its first week.

He’d never played anything like it before. “I wasn’t familiar with the genre at all, but I loved Civilization and Colonisation, so it felt cool to be able to grow and build, and form an alliance,” he told me. “I loved the feel and story of the world, then when more players started joining that added a whole new dimension to the gameplay.”

He cheesed it on day two

On his second day he had one very long session, and he spent it on quests. “I was spamming quests for so many resources,” he says. Partway through it I sent him a message: “well. you did it lol.” He replied “Hahah now I can quit”, then “First to take a screenshot”. He didn’t quit.

I didn’t see this coming at all. I didn’t even know the word for it, Chris is the one who taught me “cheesing”. I don’t cheese games. I idle in them, mess about a little, and wait for timers like a normal person. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the first thing a player would do is look for the edge of the rules and lean on it. It turns out a lot of people do exactly that, and Chris was just the first one to do it in front of me. By day five in the world he held 11 islands, nearly a third of everything that had been settled.

Islands with no buildings, and a sea that didn’t move

For anyone playing now, it’s hard to picture how rough it was. There was no brake on colonising, so if you had the ships you could take island after island. On the region map, islands were little green blobs on a flat blue sea. The islands didn’t have buildings on them yet, and the water didn’t animate. Raiding was a different system too, with no wild defenders and no diminishing returns.

Chris helped me a lot in those first few weeks. He found bugs, told me what felt rough, and asked for a lot of things. He wanted more customisation, and I held off on that to keep the focus on the strategy. Watching him expand did change one rule early, though. Within a week I changed colonisation so the odds fall with every island you already hold, and that later became Expansion Stress, where the penalty eases off once the islands you have are developed. One player had taken a third of the map in a week, so there had to be something. There’s still no hard cap. The biggest player in Founders World holds 233 islands today.

Some players want to be at the top of something

The bigger thing Chris taught me took longer to sink in. Some players want to be at the top of something, and they’ll play very hard to get there. I don’t play like that. I’m happy somewhere in the middle, poking at whatever looks interesting, and I didn’t realise it was really a thing. At the start the game had one ladder, the player ranking, and only one person could be at the top of it. By day two that was Chris.

So I started scaling it sideways. Instead of one ladder, more of them. Achievement sets came first, so there was always a set to finish off. Then a Warlords board for fighting, and island prestige, so every island had its own climb. By May the single rankings tab had turned into a grid of scoreboards, and the prestige dialog showed you a percentage. Today there are seven boards: the realm rankings, Warlords, Plunderers, Treasure Hunters, Spymasters, Stewards and Wealthiest.

More ladders still left a problem. Founders World doesn’t reset, so an all-time board fills up with the people who got there first, and Chris is exactly the kind of player it favours. Someone who joins now might never see their name near the top. In June the scoreboards got This Week and Today views alongside All Time, so a newer player can top a week even if they never top the world. There’s still more work to do there.

I ended up looking at almost everything in the game as “you are this far from the top”. Chris kept climbing them long after he’d lost first place overall. Over the summer he was third on the Stewards board and in the top ten Treasure Hunters.

Failure should be entertaining

Chris lost a lot. He took my islands more than once, and once threw four waves at one of them. Two were wiped out completely, and the fourth took it anyway. Most of the time, though, it went the other way:

"I was convinced the game was broken cos I didn't know I had to kill all the troops first."

“I made a lot of mistakes cos I didn’t know the genre,” he says, “so for the longest time I was losing all my money sending ships and failing to capture islands.” Early on he read the spy and battle reports and told me they were terrible. When you failed, the report gave you a table of numbers and nothing else. He said failure should be entertaining, and he was right. The first report flavour text went in two days after he joined, and the comedy writing in the game started there.

The reports had a worse problem too. They were the wrong way round. Half the time he was getting the other side’s version of a fight, and some of them didn’t agree with themselves.

He kept telling me about these, and I kept fixing them. The fix for that one, where an attack only counts as a win if some of your attackers survive, went in the same day. A lot of the early report fixes came from him pointing at the ones that made no sense.

He ran the most fun alliance in the world

April was his busiest month, when the Reddit wave arrived and the world suddenly had strangers in it. He ran an alliance and kept it loose. He renamed 23 of his islands in one sitting after real places, Koh Tao, Fiji, Samoa, Micronesia, and one he’d taken off me became “Attack Darrenistan”. In May he used the town crier to ask the whole world to “Please Send lumen to Hong Kong in 7:8 immediately and I will owe you a favour, Mafia style.” He’s also the one who pointed me at NationStates, which is where council affairs got the axes that shape what kind of governor you become.

He faded, slowly

He didn’t stop in one go. He played every day through May, most days in June, a few days in July, and after that he only came back a handful of times. His last visit was in the middle of September.

The reason was a good one. “I was unemployed when I started, so I had nothing better to do,” he says. “Then I got busy vibe coding my own game, Bangkok: City of Legends.” One of those later visits was a few hours long, and it was him trying to get back in. “I went back to check on it after a month away, and someone had just started attacking me. My spider sense must have been tingling. I built back and even launched a bit of a counter attack, but then got distracted and forgot about the game again.” After that I told him he was going to get mauled.

The raids started the week after he stopped. From late July his islands were raided or plundered nearly 2,000 times, mostly by players who arrived in the summer, Miko Misan more than anyone. The odd thing is that his score kept him on the leaderboards the whole way through. He was seventh on the Warlords board a week before his last login, while people were emptying his islands every day.

The rule that removed him

In the game, any of your colonies can be liberated: if someone razes its main house down, the island goes back to the wild. Your starter island is safe until you’ve been away for 14 days and become Forsaken. After that, liberating it removes you from the world. I built that because a persistent world fills up with dead empires otherwise, and the new players who arrive get a map full of ghosts to farm instead of neighbours to fight.

Exactly 14 days after Chris’s last login, Wilhelm1908 raided Micronesia seven times in one evening, and minutes later the game removed Chris from the world. He was in it for 206 days.

Where he is now

His islands are gone now. Of the 30 islands of his that were raided, 26 are back in the wild, three belong to Windy Walrus and one to the Black Tide. A few of the things he found are still in the game. Colonisation gets harder as you grow, the reports are funny when you lose, and they go to the right side.

He’s still a good friend, and he still sends me a marketing report every month. He played a game that barely worked, for longer than most people play a finished one, and spent the first few weeks of it telling me what was wrong with it.

I asked him what he’d tell someone starting now. “Join an alliance and don’t start on anyone who’s active in the game. There’s mostly a cold war between the 3 big alliances, so you’ll be safe as they pick on the inactive players. That’s the best defence, just log in often.” He also has one regret. “I wish I’d have used my head start to kick off a big world war between the alliances, but it feels pretty demoralising to have everything you’ve built over the weeks destroyed, and it’s a nice community of players, so mostly they don’t like bullies, and will team up to protect the noobies.”

If he ever wants back in, Founders World has plenty of space.

What happened to every island

For the record, here’s every island Chris still had when the raids started, by the name he gave it, and what became of it. “Unknown” is the game’s own word: it hides who liberates a neglected island, so I don’t know either.

Island	Raids	What happened
New Island Nova Insel	25, some of them mine	Liberated by someone unknown. Black Tide moved in, Turtle Blues threw it out
Hong Kong	87	Liberated by someone unknown. Black Tide moved in, Flowkap threw it out. Nobody sent the lumen
(a name I can’t print)	42	Liberated by someone unknown
Turks and Caicos	73	Liberated by someone unknown, then claimed by Windy Walrus
Attack Darrenistan	50, some of them mine	Liberated by someone unknown, just before his last login
Aruba	67	Liberated by someone unknown
Bonaire	41	Liberated by someone unknown
Curacao	43	Liberated by Flowkap
Saint Martin	50	Liberated by Flowkap, right after Curacao
FAFO island	19	Liberated by someone unknown
FAFO repercussions	23	Liberated by someone unknown. Black Tide moved in, Windy Walrus threw it out
(another name I can’t print)	41	Liberated by Flowkap
Koh Samet	33	Liberated by Flowkap
Fiji	39	Liberated by Flowkap
Great Britain	92	Liberated by someone unknown
Sri Lanka	95	Liberated by someone unknown
Strait of Hormuz	96	Liberated by someone unknown. Black Tide moved in, Turtle Blues threw it out, Black Tide came back
Guam	29	Liberated by Flowkap
The Azores	72	Liberated by someone unknown, then claimed by Windy Walrus
Koh Arai	36	Liberated by Flowkap
The Bahamas	92	Colonised straight off him by Windy Walrus
The Cayman Islands	94	Held on to the end
Manao Beach	49	Held on to the end
New Zealand	66	Held on to the end
Koh Chang	127, the most of any	Held on to the end
Koh Bon	71	Held on to the end
Samoa	48	Held on to the end
Koh Tao	89	Held on to the end
Melanesia	55	Held on to the end
Micronesia	95	The last one. Wilhelm1908 raided it seven times, and that evening Chris was gone