The Broken Seal

What it is

The Broken Seal is an original turn-based strategy game in the tradition of the classic officer-and-province games. Each month you give orders to your provinces and officers; when you end the month, every house's orders are carried out together and you read what happened.

Your officers do the work. Each has ratings for command, warfare, administration and intrigue, a character, a loyalty that can fail, and a stamina that work wears down. They develop farmland and trade, repair forts, train troops, gather news of the neighbours and lead your armies. In town they raise soldiers, buy and sell grain at the market, and hire the travellers staying at the inn.

Armies need grain and pay. When they meet, you can fight the battle yourself on a hex field or leave it to your commanders. Make treaties, trade and form coalitions; the throne goes to whoever holds two-thirds of the realm, alone or with allies. There is no time limit.

Play alone against up to five computer houses at five levels. To play with friends, start an online game in the browser edition (see below).

You can also play it in your web browser, with nothing to install. The browser edition is the same game, version 0.6.1. Saves stay in your browser; Export in the Load window saves a campaign to a file, which the desktop edition can open, and Import opens desktop saves.

Multi-player games: choose 7, Multi-Player game, on the title screen of the browser edition. Make a player name, start a game and give your friends its invite code, or join theirs. Each month the game waits for everyone to end their turn, up to a time limit the game's creator chose (12 to 72 hours); anyone who has not played by then has their month played by the computer, and keeps their house. You get an email when a month is done and a reminder before the deadline (you can turn these off). Online games are played in the browser edition only.

Screenshots

Features

Installing

Windows

1. Download BrokenSeal-0.6.1-x64.msi and run it. It installs for your user only, so no administrator password is needed, and adds The Broken Seal to the Start menu and the desktop.
2. The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn you first: choose More info, then Run anyway.

Linux

1. Download brokenseal_0.6.1_amd64.deb and install it:

   sudo apt install ./brokenseal_0.6.1_amd64.deb

2. Start it from the Games menu, or run brokenseal.

Saves are kept in %APPDATA%\BrokenSeal on Windows and ~/.local/share/brokenseal/ on Linux, and are left alone when you uninstall or upgrade. Saves from earlier versions load in this one.

Downloads

Version 0.6.1, 3 November 2026.

Also on the BBS in the file area Heisenbergs Files. The player manual and the release notes are here to read first.

What's new

0.6.1: Officers (order 2) shows the officers in the province selected on the map. An officer can travel to any province you hold, not only a neighbour: the journey takes a month for every two borders crossed, and while on the road he is in no province and takes no orders. If his destination is lost on the way, he goes to the nearest province you still hold. In the browser edition, online games are now called Multi-Player games (7 on the title screen).

0.6.0: one player per computer: hotseat is gone, and a new game goes from the scenario straight to choosing your house. To play with friends, use online games in the browser edition. Campaigns saved with more than one player still open: you keep the house that was playing and the computer leads the others. Fixes: a military access treaty now opens every province (it stopped at province 24), and Ransom and Exchange list only your officers held captive.

0.5.0: hex battles. When your armies fight, you can fight the battle yourself on a 15 × 11 hex field drawn from the province, with hills, forest, marsh, rivers and fords, and town walls with a gate where the forts are strong. Each army splits into infantry, archers and cavalry, and each unit gets one order a turn. Or leave it to your commanders; Settings can make either the rule.

0.4.6: a province your army takes is held, but it is not yours until you name a governor, usually the army's commander, who then gives up the army to its new garrison. End month is now the last order, 9.

0.4.5: new recruits join untrained, and men who join a garrison share its training by numbers, so green men pull a trained garrison down. Outlaw camps have their own training.

0.4.4:

• One governance order a province each month (farmland, commerce, forts or relief).
• Stamina: work tires officers, and tired officers must rest.
• The town: recruit soldiers, buy and sell grain at the market, hire travellers at the inn.
• Winter snow can close the roads to town.
• News of the month: each attack by a computer house is shown as the month ends.
• Background music, with on/off and volume in Settings.

Everything else is in the release notes.

Licence and source

The Broken Seal is Copyright © 2026 Michael Slater. It is free software: you may copy, change and share it under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version. It comes with no warranty. The source is in brokenseal-0.6.1-source.tar.gz above, and is also installed with the game; it builds with Free Pascal 3.2.2 and Lazarus 4.4 on Linux, for Linux and Windows.

Contact

Questions, bug reports and suggestions are welcome. Email slaterm@theiguru.au, or leave a message for the sysop on the Kalgoorlie Retro BBS (telnet bbs.theiguru.au).