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The logo of Warscape, one of the most popular
forum board games
"Forum Games" are a unique, forum post based minigames made for casual entertainment for users of any given forum. Some examples are "Post to 100 before a Mod posts", "Answer a question with a song", or "This or That" - the Clan Quest versions of which you can see by clicking the associated links. While these are examples of what a "typical" forum game is, that is not what this page is about. This page is about Clan Quest's history with a unique group of forum games: Forum Board Games.
A "Forum Board Game", in this context, is a board game - particular games like Mafia, Risk, or Monopoly - that is played entirely on the Clan Quest forums. The rules of these games are adapted to work in a post-by-post format, often spread out over the course of days, weeks, or even months, requiring players to interact with the game once a day to keep it moving. The history of these games dates back to some of the earliest days of the Clan website, and have been one of the Clan's favorite, if not hidden, passtimes.
Contents
History
Earliest Attempts
The earliest known attempt at hosting a "Forum Board Game" was made by Fatalflair10, who on September 23, 2011, tried to start a forum game based on the popular deception game "Mafia". Nine people signed up to play, and Fatalflair even started the game and posted the first few turns. Unfortunately the steam died out quickly, and within a few days the game had been abandoned, left incomplete. There were brief talks about reviving it in January 2012, but these ultimately went nowhere.
It didn't actually take long until someone else showed interest in holding a forum board game like this, as on December 20, 2011 Menendark2 posted a thread gauging the interest in a "Command and Conquer" forum game. A few people showed interest, but the game never actually started. Still, this is the first known instance of a "nation conquering"-based forum game cropping up on our forums, and it would by absolutely no means be the last.
War Games
Board for the first game of Warscape
On March 13, 2013, more than a year after Command and Conquer failed to begin, the first ever game of "Warscape" began. Hosted by AlphaLeo, this was a game where players controlled their very own "nation" on a map comprising Europe, Northern and Central Africa, and Western Asia. The goal was to be in the last alliance standing. 14 players signed up, and when the game ended on May 5, just under two months later, had only two players left standing: Supmyninja and Mock turtle. Warscape was the first forum board game to ever be seen through to the end, and its popularity was capitalized on.
On May 11, less than a week after the end of the first game, AlphaLeo started a second game of Warscape, though this time only with 9 players. The game was another hit, and ended on June 23rd with three winners: Sirapyro, Ytse, and Loud12100. Though the game was a hit it was a lot of work to maintain and update every day, and so it was not immediately followed up with another. In fact, no forum board games would occur for almost a full year, until finally a third game of Warscape was initiated by Andrew Cinqo. With 9 players, the game was another popular one, but signups were slower than they had been in previous games, and ultimately the game was forced to end prematurely when Andrew Cinqo's computer broke down at the end of July. It would never be completed after that.
Board for Clan Quest Monopoly
Shortly after the third Warscape fell apart there were still people itching to play the game, especially considering some of them never got to actually finish the game they had been playing, so Seb took it upon himself to host a new game, but decided to rebrand it. On August 7, 2014, Seb began the first game of "The Noob Wars", which was functionally similar to Warscape but used a different map, and players had different objectives. 12 peoples signed up for this game, and it actually ran to completion, wrapping things up on September 23 with Supmyninja declared the winner.
Monopoly and More
While Monopoly was soon to come, it's worth nothing another board game was played in the time between it and The Noob Wars. On September 29, 2014, Llol monster was the second person to attempt to host a forum game inspired by "Mafia". Unlike the first attempt, though, this game was actually seen through until its end! Seven players spent a week trying to decipher the mystery but ultimately the mafia, consisting of Holysanctum and Supmyninja, were victorious.
Then, on June 27, 2015, Sirapyro hosted the first ever game of "Clan Quest Monopoly", based on the popular board game Monopoly and set on a custom-built board filled with references to Clan Quest. The game only had 4 players - which it was designed for - but proved to be wildly popular, as it would be replayed several times after. There was actually so much interest in playing the game that Sirapyro began a second game of Monopoly, this time with six players, a little more than a week later, on July 5, and ran both of them concurrently. While the first game ended successfully on August 5 that year, with Supmyninja being declared the winner, Sirapyro suffered hard drive problems, and ultimately lost the files allowing him to complete the second game.
Sirapyro took a break from hosting Monopoly after that, having overextended himself running two games simultaneously, but another game started, having been inspired. On July 20, 2015, Wolffi began a forum version of the game "Betrayal at House on the Hill", which successfully ran with 8 players for a little less than a month, when Wolffi became unable to host it any longer and it was canceled. After than Seb attempted to host a second game of The Noob Wars, but the game ultimately never had enough people sign up for it to begin.
Clan Quest War Map
A Surge of Monopoly and War Games
After the better part of a year, on June 3, 2016, Sirapyro returned with his third game of Monopoly, subtitled "Rebirth" because Sirapyro is cheesy and overdramatic. The game ran for more than two months before ending on August 13, when Shane was declared the winner. Less than a month later, on August 31, Sirapyro returned with his fourth game of Monopoly, which ended on September 26 with a victory from Kitty.
Now on a roll, Sirapyro tried his hand at the historically most popular forum board game: Warscape. On September 20, 2016, Sirapyro began the fourth game of Warscape, with 12 players joining him. The game was, once again, wildly popular, and to this day it remains not only Clan Quest's most-interacted with forum board game, it is one of the single most viewed threads on the entire forum. This didn't mean that Sirapyro had forgotten about Monopoly though, and on September 27 - a week after Warscape began - Sirapyro also started the fifth game of Monopoly, running both concurrently. Warscape ended on December 24, 2016 with a four-way victory between Kitty, Wolffi, Shane, and Xenon ray, while Monopoly ended on December 27 with a win from Shane.
Forum board games, it turns out, are large time investment to run, and require a lot of attention to detail, so after nearly four months of hosting games non-stop Sirapyro decided to take a short break from hosting them, but that does not mean they stopped. Less than a week after the fifth game of Monopoly ended a sixth one began, but this time it was hosted by Shane. This iteration of the game ran until February 13, and in the end Kyratian was victorious.
The board for the failed Capture the Vex game
A couple of months passed with no new games, but on April 7, 2017, Sirapyro returned with "Clan Quest War". This was a rebranded version of Warscape created after a disagreement between Sirapyro and AlphaLeo, the games creator, that featured a new, RuneScape-themed map and more complex rules. 10 players joined this game and it lasted only a little more than a month - a complete turnaround from the longevity of Sirapyro's first foray into a war game. The game came to a close on May 15, 2017, with victory shared between Wolffi, Choto 3000, and Cireon. A few days later, on May 19, the seventh game of Monopoly began, once again hosted by Shane. This one lasted almost two full months before ending on July 17 when Sirapyro won.
Desiring to do something new and more creative, Sirapyro put effort into creating a "Capture the Flag"-based forum game, dubbed "Capture the Vex", using movement and gameplay mechanics from Dungeons & Dragons. He initially tried to gauge peoples interest in the idea in May, immediately after Clan Quest War came to a close, but wouldn't actually attempt to start the game until August 15 that year. Unfortunately, he was unable to get the game started, and so the game was never actually played.
A couple months went by until the next game was hosted, and when it came it was the eighth game of Monopoly, still being hosted by Shane and starting on February 23, 2018. It lasted a full month, ending on March 24, at which point Kitty took victory. Sirapyro didn't try to host another game until May 20, 2018 when he initiated the second game of Clan Quest War, but he couldn't get enough people to sign up and so it never happened.
Games New and Old
After two failed attempts in a row to get a forum board game running, Sirapyro returned on November 19, 2018 with a RuneScape-themed version of the board game "Clue", dubbed "Clue Quest". Clue, as a game, is relatively short compared to games like Monopoly or Risk, and so this game ran for less than a week, ending on November 24 when Derparnieux successfully guessed that the victim was killed in the Library by the Noob with a Wooden Spoon.
The bulletin board for Werewolf
Re-emboldened by the success of Clue, and having some free time on his hands, Sirapyro took another swing at Clan Quest War, and successfully got the third iteration of that game going with 11 players starting December 25, 2018. This one lasted much longer than the first Clan Quest War game, due in part to problems arising in parts of the Clan, but ultimately came to an end on March 10, 2019, and saw a shared victory between Shane, Choto 3000, Toragrai, and Dawn. A week later Sirapyro followed up with the second game of Clue, which ended on March 28 after Derparnieux once again proved that they are the best at Clues. I mean Clue.
After that second game of Clue, the semi-consistent activity in forum games finally died down. It wasn't until more than a year later, on June 29, 2020, that the next one began: Werewolf, hosted by Questcaping and based on Mafia and other similar games, such as Town of Salem. This game ended on July 8, 2020 with a Werewolf victory after all townspeople were murdered except for Derparnieux, one of the Wolves, and Choto 3000, the turncoat.
Forum game activity slowed again after the completion of the Werewolf game, until Choto 3000 revived Warscape on July 28, 2021. This game, the fourth iteration of Warscape, is still ongoing almost a year later.
About the Games
Are you curious about how these games actually worked? While the best way to actually know how they worked is to go and visit their respective forum threads and read the rules, which you can do since those threads have been linked to throughout this page, you can read a "cliff notes" version of some of the more popular ones here.
War Games
While there are technically three different versions of the war game, those being Warscape, The Noob Wars, and Clan Quest War, and each of those have different rules version-to-version, the basic gameplay mechanics are fundamentally the same. Players choose a color, a name, and a starting location for their country based on the provided map, and then at the start of every turn they are given a number of "tiles"/"spaces"/"provinces"(for you Paradox folks out there) that they can take that turn. Those tiles they take can either be unclaimed - the color white or gray on the board - or they can belong to another player.
The goal is ultimately to eliminate the other players by taking all of their tiles. That becomes tricky when the game is a 1v1 and you're getting random rolls every turn, you would have to consistently roll better than your opponent to ever have a chance at winning. Because of this, Warscape and Clan Quest War had rules in place that "Alliances" of players could win, in sizes ranging from 2 to 4, depending on the game. The Noob Wars, on the other hand, was geared towards capturing a countries capital rather than all of its tiles - so this version of the game actually did have a single winner. Additionally, the Clan Quest War edition of the game added "resources" to the map that gave a players country special bonuses, like more "tiles" they could take per turn - an addition that ultimately made the game more complicated and harder to manage.
Monopoly
Everyone's favorite deal-making, property-managing, back-stabbing, capitalist hell of a board game! As with most board games, Monopoly is played in turns where one player goes, then the next, then the next... to do this in the forum setting would be tedious and it'd ultimately take far, far longer to complete. To compensate for this, the forum version of Monopoly had every player take their turn at the same time, but with a set turn "priority".
At the beginning of every turn rolls would be randomly generated for each player, and their tokens would automatically be moved to the appropriate space, and any chance or community chest cards were automatically applied. The player could take control and determine if they wanted to buy the property they landed on if it was for sale, trade with other players, manage their properties, and so on. If two players landed on the same for-sale property in the same turn, then the player who had been given the higher "turn priority" at the beginning of the game would get first dibs. This, in effect, emulated a turn-based system, while also having every player move at once.
Other than that, the game ran pretty much as you'd expect. It's Monopoly, people were betrayed, friendships were ruined! All that jazz.
Clue
The board from Clue Quest
Much like Monopoly, breaking Clue into single turns would be excessively tedious and draw the game out, so it was also run under the "Turn priority" system where everyone's rolls would be applied at once, but if anything conflicted for some reason then the player with the higher pre-determined turn priority would go first. As far as Clue goes, this usually only applied to when players chose to make an accusation. If two players correctly guessed the three factors of the murder in the same turn, then the player with higher turn priority would win, because if this game were to take place anywhere but a forum, that person's turn technically would have happened before the other person could have accused to begin with.
The "all at once" turn priority method meant that every players guess was addressed at the same time, meaning every player could try to deduce certain facts about the killer, the murder weapon, and the place it occurred faster than a normal game, and as such the game is probably relatively shorter than a real game of Clue, in terms of number of turns.
Werewolf
Based on games like Mafia or Town of Salem, Werewolf is a deception/mystery game where the members of the town are trying to identify who the evil, murderous werewolves are before everyone in the town is brutally mauled. Some members of the town have special abilities to help them identify the werewolves, while the werewolves have unmatched killing potential. Then there's the neutral team, who have various goals that don't help either team, but certainly disrupt everyone's activities, such as the Jester who just wants to get themselves executed.
The game takes place in phases: day, sundown, and night. During the day phase players discuss, aruge, accuse, and ultimately try to figure out who did the bad things. The Werewolves are also probably trying to lie and deceive everyone into believing the wrong information. Then, during the sundown phase, the has an opportunity to vote on the execution of anyone who has been successfully accused, eliminating them and revealing their role. After this comes the night phase, where the Werewolves do their killing, and other roles get the chance to perform their actios. When the next day starts the results of the Werewolves slaughter is revealed, and the cycle repeats until either all the werewolves or all the town members are dead.