1255 Burgomaster

1255 Burgomaster is a medieval city-builder and RPG management game set around the year 1255. You run a frontier settlement: raise buildings, balance treasury and happiness, send a hero out into wild territory, fight bandits, collect artefacts, research a technology tree, and cope with whatever the event system throws at you.

It is a deliberate exercise in dependency-free development. Per the upstream README, it is written in vanilla JavaScript "without even using jQuery and modern whistlers and jugglers, such as JS frameworks, TS->JS compilers, Node.js, web servers and so on". It renders with HTML5.Canvas, saves to localStorage via JSON.parse(), and targets any ES5/ES6 browser. Stated minimum requirements were 1024 MB RAM and an 800 MHz single-core CPU.

The design goal was to stay small and fast enough to run on aging devices and phones — the whole game plus assets was budgeted at around 5 MB.

How to Play

1. Build. Take income-producing buildings, keep your population housed, and watch happiness.
2. Set taxes and rates. Taxes, birthrate and happiness respond to your policy levers, and your choices compound.
3. Recruit and garrison. Hire sergeants, knights and turkopols. Units can sit in the garrison or travel with your hero.
4. Send the hero to the adventure map. This is a HoMM-style overland map with bandit camps, goblins and treasure. Battles resolve as a battle journal log you can open and read afterwards.
5. Research at the University. Konigsberg University holds the technology tree; discoveries unlock further buildings.
6. Handle events. Random events include thefts from the treasury, fires and plagues. Time-limited Halloween and New Year events also fire.
7. Automate what you can. Autocampaigns send your hero out repeatedly without you, and a blackmarket trades in goods and artefacts.

Controls

The entire game is mouse clicks — there is no keyboard input in the source.

• Click a building in the build list to construct it
• Click tabs to switch between the city, adventure map, university, troops, blackmarket, journal and settings panels
• Click a unit to move it between garrison and hero's squad
• Click a tile on the adventure map to travel there
• Buy selected / Sell selected — trade in the blackmarket
• Send hero to autocampaign — automate exploration
• Save / Export / Import / Load game — your progress lives in localStorage, and export/import is the supported way to move a save between browsers and PCs
• Settings — autosave toggle, event-log size, tutorial messages, colour mode, Mobile UI, sound settings

Buildings

Buildings appear in the interface as their requirements are met. Named ones include:

• Fountain — happiness
• Inn — housing and morale
• Stables — mounted units
• Archery Range — ranged units
• Treasury — gold income; several things require it
• Fire brigade — fire response, which has a recurring sustain cost
• Gallows — as the README puts it, with the Gallows built "the game could become a clicker game if you build the Gallows, and like to execute your citizens"
• Konigsberg University — the tech tree
• Towngate — travel via scroll

Units

Three recruitable unit types, each assignable to garrison or hero's squad: Sergeants, Knights and Turkopols. Mercenary spearmen and swordmen are also available.

Artefacts

Collectible items with real effects, including the Crusader's Sword, Dark Pact Sword, Ring of Protection, Ring of Strength, Vial of Lifeblood, Glyph of Knight's Valor and Glyph of Monk's Virtue. Artefacts can be sold on the blackmarket or used, and several have class restrictions.

Hero units have Attack and Defence stats that can increase on level-up — with a high chance for some items — and there is a separate Magic power stat using manapoints and spellpower.

Currency

Amber is the game's own currency and, per the interface text, "Amber is the most valued currency". Gold, population and happiness are the other tracked resources, each with its own history tab so you can see when a trend started.

Tips

• Amber is the real currency, not gold. Most meaningful progress is gated on amber rather than gold, so prioritise amber income once the early buildings are up.
• The blackmarket is an artefact sink and income source. Selling artefacts is a legitimate and fast route to amber.
• Autocampaigns beat manual play once set up. Manual exploring is for when you need a specific artefact; otherwise let it run.
• Read the event log. The tabs for gold history, population history and the battle journal tell you why something went wrong, which the summary numbers do not.

About

1255 Burgomaster was created by Anton Gladyshev and is licensed under GPL v3 for the source code.

• Original game source: https://github.com/Areso/1255-burgomaster
• Original live build: https://1255.areso.pro

It is inspired by Travian, Townsmen, Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader, Heroes of Might and Magic, Lords of the Realm and the Anno series. It ships with German, English, Esperanto, Spanish, French and Russian localization.

⚠️ Asset license restriction. The upstream README states: "ALL GRAPHIC AND SOUND ASSETS UNDER PROPRIETARY LICENSE. YOU MAY NOT REDISTRIBUTE THE GAME WITH THE ASSETS VIA PUBLISHING IN INTERNET, STORES, OR ANY OTHER WAY. YOU MAY USE ASSETS ONLY FOR LOCAL RUNNING." The code is GPL, but the sprites, sounds and tiles are not. See public/games/1255-burgomaster/ATTRIBUTION.md before redistributing this build further.