Eressea¶
Eressea is a turn-based strategy game played via email and takes place in a fictional fantasy world.
The name of the game is derived from Tol Eressëa, a fictional island from the stories of J. R. R. Tolkien.
The game has had weekly moves since August 27, 1996, with a few exceptions.
Eressea has been around for over 1200 rounds. In March 2002, Bravo Screenfun magazine reported on Eressea.
The number of players then skyrocketed. Eressea had its peak in terms of players with over 2000 factions, but since then the trend has been falling.
In April 2009, the main Eressea game had almost 600 factions.
In April 2015 there were still a good 220.
The game is designed for any number of players.
The game world consists of many islands and is populated by the player factions and a global monster faction.
As a player, you control a faction that belongs to one of several races from the typical fantasy repertoire and whose units can learn various skills, mine resources and build buildings, transport and weapons.
What makes the game interesting is the interaction with other factions and therefore other players.
In the main game Eressea there is no official game goal or end to the game.
However, there were several direct offshoots under the name Vinyambar.
The Vinyambar games had some more, some less big rule differences compared to the original game, and some even had a specific and fixed game goal.
All Vinyambar variants also had to be paid for.
There were also several games of "High Speed Eressea" (HSE) in which evaluations took place in an independent instance over a weekend at a time interval of around 15 minutes.
In July 2009, a new game world with changed rules was launched, known as Eressea 3 or E3 for short.
This should serve as a test for newer versions of Eressea.
In addition, from April 2014 there was a game for Patreon supporters under the name Deveron.
The games ended in August and March 2019 because, after several major conflicts had been resolved, the vast majority of the still active factions were no longer interested in continuing.
There were also always smaller instances that were started privately by dedicated players.
The game was originally a spin-off of German Atlantis, a German-language version of the English Atlantis 1.0.
You can now also play it with English texts.
Since December 2008, normal registrations were no longer possible, but the game continued to run.
At the beginning of 2015, the first test players were settled back in Eressea.
This was a test intended to show whether it is possible to launch new factions in old regions and what these factions need to get started in order to complete the task.
A short time later, registration for new factions that would be launched in new worlds was possible again.