Dune Wars is probably the finest Civ IV mod I’ve ever played. I’m certainly fond of Fall from Heaven for how it’s wildly inventive and cleverly put together. But the AI seems less inclined to fall apart in Dune Wars. Furthermore, Dune Wars is such a unique and thorough expression of Frank Herbert’s fiction, which is second only to Star Wars in terms of the hold it had on my adolescent imagination.

So I was pretty disappointed when Bruce Geryk and I couldn’t get the multiplayer to work. I was keen to play the Harkonnens to his Atreides, or maybe to let him run roughshod over the early game with the Fremen while my House Corrino ferried Sardaukar from offworld for an imperial endgame, or perhaps I’d try my hand at the Bene Gesserit to cultivate a Kwisatch Haderach. But we hit on the idea of a succession game, the same way people pass around saved games for Dwarf Fortress. I’d play fifty turns, then he’d play fifty turns, then I’d play fifty turns, and so on, until we won.

You can read about it in the first new Tom vs Bruce, which is online now for the folks who supported us at the second tier or higher on Kickstarter. Alternatively, you can donate to our PayPal link at tomvsbruce.com. Or you can just wait until it goes public on Wednesday morning. Whatever the case, we hope you enjoy reading about our Dune Wars game as much as we enjoyed playing it.