Starborne is a take on the grand-strategy 4X genre with the added powerful impact of being a multiplayer game played in real-time. In Starborne each game will last 10 weeks culminating in a decisive endgame.

You start with a fledgling station and as you invest in its infrastructure you will see it take shape and its borders grow, bringing unclaimed territories under your sovereignty. Soon it will be time to build another station with its own unique purpose within your master-plan. Will the next station be a center of research? A military compound? Or an industrial complex?

In Starborne there are multiple paths to success. Spymasters use their gathered intelligence to steer others’ ambitions to their own end. Explorers go on star treks searching for hidden riches and fame while industry moguls establish vast trade networks and utilize the final frontier's boundless resources. Spartan defenders focus on impregnable defenses and use their fleets to protect their sovereignty and that of their allies while Space-Napoleons use their offensive fleets to plunder opponents and pave their path to glory.

Having now developed a brand new faster paced game mode, dubbed Dead Zone, that takes 4 hours to complete or under 3% of the time it takes to complete a regular 10 week game of Starborne. The studio will be previewing the mode this weekend with a tournament that lets the victors contribute to Starborne’s lore. 

Some of the new innovations and features that will be previewed: 

• 4 hour game rounds
• Four new playable factions; Nightcorps, Les Apaches, Surpasum, Gatos Fritos
• Claiming special hexes now gives unique empire wide bonuses
• New much smaller map featuring 25 player starting locations 
• New Cards and card pool overhauled
• New Nebula
• New Station Planner with new buildings and organizations
• Tournament victors will get a unique chance to contribute to the Starborne lore
• Sprawling Radiation pools now appear on the map and must be contained

Commenting on the new game mode, Stefan Gunnarsson, CEO and Lead Designer on Starborne said, “We have been playing Dead Zone a lot in the office and we are incredibly excited about its potential. We have spent the last few years building up our own framework to make large-scale strategy games and Dead Zone is a showcase of how powerful that framework is becoming. Our community has been the cornerstone behind our success so we are excited to reward the victors of this first Dead Zone Tournament with a unique opportunity to contribute to the history of the Starborne universe.”

Interested fans can sign up to get access to the Open Beta.