A Shot from the Guntower: October 2025

So Peeps, we did it.

In this newsletter I’m going to talk about:

·        Pandora Fulfilment

·        The Pirates & Salvage Expansion

·        Why I designed Carta Imperia

PANDORA FULFILMENT

Pandora Fulfilment is now officially complete.  We delivered the last box by hand last week.  So as far as we are aware, everyone who is expecting a copy of Pandora Celeste has now received one.  If you haven’t – and you completed your Pledge Manager by June 2025 – then please reach out to us at info@guntowergames.com and we’ll sort it for you.

Thank you so much for your support.  This, as you know, has been a passion project for me – the culmination of a life-long dream, and I can’t thank you enough for helping us make it happen.

Thanks also to all of you who have rated the game on BGG.  We’re currently sitting on 8.3 and I’m really proud of the fact that we only have one red rating (from someone who said it’s ‘Not my type of game’, so no surprise there).  Most of you who have played the game seem to really enjoy it and get that we were aiming for a game that’s as much about the experience as it is about winning or losing. 

If you’ve enjoyed the core game and would like to add even more variety, feel free to check out our Online Store, where you can add-on Marina the Colonial Marine, Science Officer Keni and Extra Stories as well as the ShapeShifter. 

There are also a limited number of Minis still available if you want to bling up your game.

If you’ve already got all the Add-Ons and still want more, we have good news…

THE PIRATES ARE COMING!

We have just launched the Preview Page for our Pandora: Pirates & Salvage Expansion on Gamefound.

If you’d like this to happen, please do Follow us on Gamefound, since that tells us how many people are interested and whether we have enough interest to launch the campaign.

We’d also really appreciate if you could press the Fan Button: ❤️ on the Pirates BGG Page, as that pushes us up the algorithm on BGG and helps to raise awareness of the game.

And talking about awareness, if you felt like posting a link to the Preview Page on your favourite social media site, it would really help us get the word out.

Meanwhile, as a thank you to our loyal backers, if you Follow us on Gamefound, you will not only get the standard Follower Gift for new subscribers, but anyone who has backed Pandora Celeste will also get a further £2 off the Gamefound price. That's a whopping 12% discount for all Crewmates of Pandora Celeste.

If all goes well, we hope to launch the Pirates Crowdfunder in November, but that will depend entirely on how many people are showing an interest on Gamefound.

So if you've enjoyed your time on the Pandora and would like even more Nastiness to come crawling out of those dark corners...

BUT, MIKE, WHAT ABOUT CARTA IMPERIA?

I am painfully aware that Pandora has been monopolising our time recently, so I haven’t been talking about Carta Imperia as much as some of you might like. 

To be honest, that’s likely to remain true until November, but I am hoping to publish a Carta Preview Page on Kickstarter before then.

In the meantime, I thought you might like to know why I designed it in the first place.

I’ve been obsessed with the Romans since I was 5 years old – so much so that I did a PhD on the Roman Army and fully expected to become an academic studying Roman history, until I discovered that making history programmes for TV was much more fun and paid better.

Despite being an expert in the late Roman Army, my favourite period in Roman history has always been the Republic.  The Republic is fascinating!  It’s full of amazing stories, incredible characters and Machiavellian politics that makes Littlefinger in Game of Thrones look like an amateur by comparison. 

But one of the things that never gelled with me was the constant attempt by some historians to identify political factions within Roman politics during the Republic.  As far as I could see, Roman politics simply wasn’t like that.  It was much more fluid and opportunistic.  People didn’t side with the Optimates or Populares on a permanent basis: they formed temporary alliances for personal political gain and immediately changed sides when the wind changed.

That’s what I wanted to simulate with Carta Imperia.  But I wanted the game to be more than just an historical simulation.  I wanted it to have the grand sweep and feel of an empire-building 4X – as magisterial and high-stakes as the formation of the Roman Empire!  And I wanted a system that could be expanded in later games to take in China, Persia, India and even the barbarian migrations on the Russian Steppes.

But…  (and this is a big ‘but’)…

4X games are HUGE!  They take hours to play, have tons of bits and they cost a fortune! 

Thing is: they don’t have to be. 

On the face of it, Carta Imperia looks very modest.  It’s just a bunch of cards with some wooden meeples and tokens.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t grand in scope.  It covers the whole sweep of Roman history from 510BC to the fall of the Republic in 27BC (or BCE if you insist).  It has territorial expansion, epic battles, tech-trees that tip the balance and deals with deals within deals…  All delivered in just a couple of hours rather than the whole day you have to give up for most 4X games.

And if I get it right, you’ll get all of this at a price you can afford, in a time when all around you is getting more and more expensive.

If that sounds good to you, I’ll be posting a Preview Page as soon as I can.  

So watch this space.