Evernight Games
Evernight Games is one of the earliest providers of online browser-based games.
From Monarchy to Canon
In June 2000 Audyssey introduced Evernight Design Corp in Issue 23 of Audyssey Magazine: 'Computer Games Accessible to the Blind'. It said that in 1998 Monarchy had become part of the Shareplay Network of Games, and that the original creators (Dustin Collis, Decae) were now working for Shareplay. Monarchy ran at Shareplay for a couple of years, and was voted as MPoGD's second ever GOtM.
On November 1, 2000, Evernight Games returned, having split from Shareplay, and Canon was born. Canon – like Monarchy – proved to be successful, and in August 2001 it was the 21st game to be awarded the MPoGD Game of the Month Award.
Less than 6 months after breaking away from Shareplay, Evernight had over 7000 registered members However, the bursting of the Dot-com bubble forced the site to become pay to play in order to keep the game running. To cater to their now paying userbase, Evernight released several new versions of the game Last Guild Standing and Last Man Standing, and two additional theme based Message Boards; Jersey Shore and Exodus 7. These early days under the pay to play era were troubled, the site frequently going down for one reason or another.
On April 9, 2002 Evernight announced they were opening a free game to the public In November of that year, the game become completely free again.
A year later on the 19th April 2003, OMGN broke news that Evernight had disappeared from its perch on the World Wide Web. Several weeks beforehand a dispute with hosting providers had forced the game to be closed, and Tempers Ball was running from a small server. On April 29 it was announced that move to the dedicated server was complete
Tempers Ball gained a reputation as a place to go and roleplay, and was listed by Roleplay Gateway one of its 'Places to Roleplay'.
On December 1, 2006 a new version of the Canon game, called Massacre, started.
July 2007 saw the next chapter in the reshape of Canon. The three guilded environments; Guilds, Valid and Covenant, were all discontinued 1. In their place, another new game called Unity. Unity built on the changes Massacre had introduced into the codebase, and added another selection of new elements. These included a built in scouts database, a guildwide news store, and a second realm to play with. Unity also took the 9 races that had been made available to Massacre, and introduced a random guest race to join the usual suspects each age.
The changes continued into the start of 2008, with the introduction of the 'Chaos Games' and the combining of Solo, Turmoil and Massacre into a single forum in Tempers Ball. At this point, Solo joined Massacre and Unity in the newer version of the Canon game code. While no major features were added for Solo, it inherited the random selection of playable races from Unity, as well as receiving a few tweaks to make the game a little more fair and challenging.
Last Quad Standing
The final development, in May 2008 saw the final end to the Turmoil game. In its place another new installment called Last Quad Standing was released. LQS seeing several combinations of options from Unity and Massacre. New Player Protection was set for a week, during that time each realm received enough turns to build significantly strong realms. NPP was then removed – and signups closed.
From Canon to Monarchy
Following a decision by Dustin in september 2009 to finally close Evernight Games, the community returned back to the name Monarchy.. Tempers Ball was left online to ensure that players could find their way to the new incarnation. In 2011 in conjunction with Table Warfare Ltd., a miniature range set in the Tonan world is currently being created, including miniatures commissioned by, and based on some of the well known players from the games history.
Stories of Tonan
Recent changes have also seen an attempt to bring back the historical roleplay roots of the site. In an attempt to pull together the strands of several different storylines, into one coehesive over story. Along with the game, the Stories of Tonan forums have moved back to Monarchy.
Games
Following closure of the site in 2009, no games are now played from evernight.com.
Canon: Unity
Unity is now the only game in the Canon genre, that allows for players to work together in Guilds. The game allows you to create 2 different kingdoms, and provides 4 turns an hour – with a maximum of 150. Unity includes several features unusual to guilded games. Firstly all 'scouts' of enemy kingdoms are stored in a central database – called Ultimabase – to be referred to later by other followers of your chosen Faith. Guild Leaders are also able to access the news from any of their Guild's member realms, rather than having to wait for the player to log in and tell them.
Canon: Massacre
Massacre takes the turn-based gaming idea, and turns it on its head. Instead of giving you a set amount of turns each hour, the Evernight coders have given you all of your turns up front. This has created a King-of-the-Hill type game, where players see how long they can survive. The game introduced only one way of getting new turns, [...] other players and claiming their turns as bounty.
Canon: Solo
Solo is the oldest remaining Canon game. Players are allowed to create one realm only, and are expected to work alone in their quest to top the scrolls. Recent developments aimed at making the game harder, have added a limit into the ability to declare War. Player are now unable to attack targets that are less than 10% landmass smaller.
Canon: Last Quad Standing
LQS allows players to create up to 4 kingdoms, and spend approximately 4500 turns building a kingdom in safety. After a week, signups are turned off and New Player Protection removed for all realms. The game incorporates several of the features from other games. From Unity it includes the Ultimabase, from Massacre the bounty claims for dead and additional ranking scores. LQS also introduced a new method of alliances – similar but smaller – than Guilds, called Quads.
Canon: Duo
The latest of the Canon games is Duo. Duo allows you to create 2 kingdoms and play with the highest turn rate of any of the games, 10 turns per hour. With a turn cap of 250 turns this creates a very fast paced environment. The ability to make alliances has been removed like in Solo, however unlike Solo there is no rule preventing working with other players. Duo includes the preventions in declaring war on small targets that was introduced for Solo.