Krieg Eterna

Thanks for playing our game Krieg Eterna!

Together with my brother Alex, I’ve been working on making this game a reality since late 2022 – and we’re so excited to see people enjoy our game! A few fans have been asking how we came up with the game and setting; it’s been a long time in the works.

The summer I turned thirteen, a videogame called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt came out, and my brother and I spent just about every waking hour playing it. It’s a game about ghouls, monsters, and the man who hunts them, and would eventually go on to sell millions of copies. Bizarrely, many inhabitants of this grim fantasy world want to play a card game with you called Gwent, which would eventually become the inspiration for our game. This minigame had some pretty interesting mechanics, and I probably ended up playing it almost as much as the rest of the videogame.

Later that summer, I was going off to camp and wanted to play more Gwent, but there wasn’t a physical edition of the game. I found an online post outlining how you could roughly play with a regular deck of cards, so I taught my dad and we ended up playing a lot during camp that week. But we kept running into one problem: without any rules printed on the cards, it was pretty hard to remember what was going on.

Flash forward by a decade and I’m pretty unhappy with my first job out of college. I'm doing well and getting promotions, but the work is boring and I don’t have any real agency. One night I started thinking back to that summer when I played a lot of Gwent, and wondered if they had released a physical edition yet. They still hadn’t, so I decided to begin working on one in my free time. I quickly came to realize why they hadn’t done so: at its core, Gwent is a trading card game, meaning that you have to buy lots of cards, build a deck, and find a friend to do the same – all before you can even play your first match. There are other issues with collectible card games, like being difficult to balance and the best cards costing lots of money. So to make a long story short, we changed a lot of things to make the game closer to something you’d want to play on a cozy winter evening at home rather than at a competitive game shop. And thus Krieg Eterna was created.

As for the inspiration for Krieg Eterna’s theme, I had always been toying with the idea of a secret-role game like Avalon set during the Thirty Years’ War. Sitting in history class, I found it fascinating how the German princes in the Holy Roman Empire claimed to be fighting over religion, but would change sides constantly. My idea for the game was that there could be some Protestant princes and some Catholic princes, but you wouldn’t know who was who. I never ended up making that game, but still found the period fascinating. When I started making Krieg Eterna, my mind naturally went back to the Thirty Years’ War, as I thought it could work well with the bluffing mechanics and limited resources. I also think that it’s a pretty unique period of history that embodies the best and worst of humanity. Were the people in power fighting for their ideals, or were they using the ideas of the Reformation as cover for grabbing more power? Probably both, but it’s interesting to think about.

Anyways, thanks for playing our game! We hope to get an expansion out by the end of 2024 themed around the Vikings and titled Krieg Eterna: Valtyr, but until then: Best of luck on the Battlefield!

- Andrew and Alex Wollack

PS: If you could rate our game on Amazon it’d be a big help!