Balkania

The origins of Balkania go back quite some ways, involving the designers and developers in many different ways. The short story however is that Paul Shields and Ed Savaris developed a game concept based around modern guerilla warfare, but including other related elements to broaden the scope somewhat.

They approached us (Graham Rawlins and Kevin Flynn) because we had a working company running PBM Games, and sufficient resources to develop the idea.

This resulted in EL MYTHICO, guerilla warfare in a fictional country situated somewhere in central america. The game was quite successful, for a PBM game developed in Australia. As with most games however it had a life span. Unfortunately the team behind the game had dispersed quite a bit over the years and when it came to a new version there appeared to be little hope.

The new version was called Balkania, due to its setting somewhere in the Balkans. The choice was topical due to the breakup of Yugoslavia, but the region lends itself to this sort of game (as did central america). Balkania ended up not being a new version of EL MYTHICO but a complete rewite of the game system.

Balkania is actually the first scenario using a new game engine deveopled from the EL MYTHICO code. We redesigned a large portion of the system and recoded most of the programs. The aim was to create a game system module that could be configured for use in a number of different scenarios. Lets wait and see how it goes.

Credits

Original design: Paul Shields and Ed Savaris

Current design and rules: Kevin Flynn.

System developement: Graham Rawlins and Kevin Flynn

Original coding: Graham Rawlins

Balkania developement: Paul Shields, Ed Savaris, Graham Rawlins and Kevin Flynn.

Balkania coding: ????

Special thanks to the following people:

Bob Morris (Mercury Games), Laurent Potet (Finoldin Games),