ARTICLE: Stronghold 2nd Edition Rules and FAQ

In conjunction with Rodney Smith at Watch It Played, we have put together an excellent F.A.Q. for Stronghold. Also, while answering Rodney’s awesome questions, we found two errors in the rulebook. After conferring with Ignacy, it was determined that we just couldn’t leave the errors alone. We had to fix them. Some of you have already found the errors from Rodney’s awesome video… so, I’m here to post the updates and  share with you a little story about rules. Enjoy!

Rulebook v1.3

Rulebook v1.3

Stronghold FAQ v2.0

Stronghold FAQ v2.0

A Story of Rules

Last year was huge for us. We went global with our English releases and officially made it into US distribution on our own. We are no longer reliant on publishing partners to make our games in English. This is huge because it gives us the ability to be responsive and flexible with our products. We don’t have to convince anyone but ourselves to publish our games in English! With this growth into a larger market came massive growth in the company. Ignacy hired more people, and that gave us the ability to produce more games. We set about making 2015 huge, and boy was it. We released 8 new English titles in 2015 and over a dozen more in Polish. It was a bit crazy, and fun all at the same time. When it came to Stronghold 2nd Edition, it was decided that it would be a joint effort between Stronghold Games and us. We had a resident rules-writer on our end, and Stronghold had a guy on their end. These two guys would pass the rules file back and forth editing and checking each other’s work.

As you can imagine, something went wrong along the way. Miscommunication was a serious problem for us and at some point, we had to scrap it all and start over. The game was in print already and we needed these damn rules.

“No problem”, I thought! “I love writing rules!”

So, in a mad scramble, I had about 2 weeks to re-write the rules to a game I had never played. Yeah… that didn’t work out so great for us.

I didn’t understand a few changes on keywords.
I didn’t effectively differentiate between flavor words and rules.
Hell, I even got a few rules flat-out WRONG.
And nobody caught my mistakes. We are a team. We work on everything together, but somehow, so many errors escaped us as we put the final touches on the rules. So many problems that we decided to re-write them after Essen. Thankfully, we have AMAZING fans who helped us piece this all together and salvage what we could. Also, thanks to a shipping delay, we were able to re-print these rules and repack the games before they left for our shores.

This year, we are taking a stand against rules. We will no longer suffer these problems. We had some great internal discussion and decided to employ some special software so that we could more effectively co-write and edit the rules. We are now capable of tracking everyone’s edits in real-time and are no longer passing flies back and forth. We will work much harder on every single set of rules to come to ensure that they are crystal clear. I hope you’ll accept my apology and enjoy our game. It really is an amazing, tense, 2-player experience that deserves our love.

Welcome to PORTAL GAMES

We are bookworms. Movie maniacs. Story addicts. We grew up reading Tolkien, Howard, Herbert, Dick, Lem… We were watching Willow, Blade Runner, Never Ending Story, Robin Hood…

And yet, we don’t write books… we don’t make movies. We don’t make those things, because we make games. We make games that tell stories.