You will find the basic functionality necessary to field a game of Divine Right with players located anywhere in the world. We adopted a "function over form" development philosophy. We are aware of this general lack of "glitz" in the game and will rectify this over time, but our main objective is to connect gamers for distributed play. Disclaimers aside, I think you will find that the map looks as cool as you remember.

What you will find is essentially a virtual Divine Right board game. You will notice from the very beginning that this is not a "computer" game. At this point in the game development, the game provides little more than the communication mechanism and game memory. THE SERVER DOES NOT KNOW THE RULES and therefore can not enforce them. As in the board game, almost every action is manual. Players decide when to make die rolls and what the result means. Players are then responsible for executing the appropriate meaning of the die roll. In order to enable this, players may alter the game state in any way at any time and the server will do nothing more than log the change. But there you have the big advantage; the server REMEMBERS the change in its log. If you forget where a piece started or wonder how your opponent's troops moved so far, the server can tell you. If you are offline when your key ally was deactivated, check the die roll log to make sure. The virtual board game takes some getting used to, but it flows easily with practice.

We have considered this choice carefully and there are many reasons for our keeping the manual element of the game. Foremost, it would be very time consuming to code for all of the combinations of situations within what are complex rules. As we describe below, there are many other types of enhancements that we consider more important and we want to keep these as our development priorities. Even assuming that we could agree on and successfully enforce all of the original set of rules, we now have a game that plays 1979 Divine Right and that is all. The game would be unable to accommodate the enhanced rules and scenarios that have been published since then. Nor could it play the re-released version of the board game. We would like to provide the necessary flexibility to play with any set of rules, including any unpublished "house rules" that many players have adopted.

This game will be a continual "work in progress". Due to the ease with which we can distribute new versions, this will be a common occurrence. We are looking for your feedback to help us prioritize the features we add in the future. There are two main priorities that we have for enhancing the game. The first is to make it more asynchronous and the second is to adopt the revised rules.

By asynchronous, we mean that the game flow does not require that everyone be online at the same time. Instead, each player's turn is isolated as much as possible. In the current game, all actions (e.g. attacks, retreats, duels and leader fates) take place online. In the future releases, such resolutions will happen synchronously if both players are connected. Otherwise, the game engine will send an email to the other player. Often this message will communicate the game situation and say something like "Click DEFEND or ATTEMPT RETREAT". After two clicks by the offline player, the game engine will take care of the rest. As you can see, this will be much less invasive of the other person's time than having to connect for all actions.

There have been a number of great additions to the rules over the years and there is also a new board game version that will differ greatly from the original. We are a little "old school" in our appreciation of the original version. We need your input as which rule enhancements we should make to the game. This is certainly our second priority behind the asynchronous goal explained above.