iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Metternich allegedly had a secret staircase out of his office. Tired of meetings with "the whole of Europe" (his words, not mine), he'd slip away to Wilhelmine, Duchess of Sagan. This is how I'm showing it in my presentation. Handmade in GIMP, old school.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Preparing a talk for high school students. Step one: memes. Handmade, old-school, zero AI — one sloppy meme and my credibility with teenagers is gone forever. As you can see, I am taking this extremely seriously.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

That goat's-head drinking cup automaton? Made around 1600 by Hans Schlottheim — already a two-century-old curiosity by the time of the Congress of Vienna. Old enough to be a great story at a soirée. Now an evening attraction in Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

He raised 10,000 sheep and translated British science for fun — long before he became Switzerland's unlikely diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. Faces of Vienna: Charles Pictet de Rochemont. 🧵 (1/3)

Charles-Émile Jacque — Sheep at the Watering Hole

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Some photos from the game — this time with Asia, Zosia, Konrad and Andrzej (Michał). Andrzej won by a landslide, which mostly proves something is still broken. He insists he just mastered it. ;)

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Hey boardgamers, plans for November? 7–8 Nov, AleGramy in Gdańsk — one of Poland's biggest board game festivals. I'll be in the Prototypes area with Vienna 1814. Come say hi and give it a go.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

View from the 31st floor — which can only mean one thing: a new iteration of Vienna 1814 is heading to the office testing group today. Same little tradition, new build, new ways for playtesters to break it.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

From an 1814 Congress of Vienna ball's provisioning records: 60 Gugelhupf — the tall fluted ring cake that became the cake of Viennese coffee. Sliced, that's a few hundred servings. Designing a historical board game means caring far too much about 200-year-old dessert logistics.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Vienna 1814, iteration 3.6, first playtest Wednesday. The entertainments used to lose to the political path every time. Reworked them. Now the real test: will seasoned players pick the ballroom on purpose, not as a consolation prize?

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Two centuries ago Vienna's Prater was end-of-summer chaos: carriages, coffee houses, theatres, shows. I've tried for ages to make it feel that alive in my board game without it being pure randomness. Iteration 3.6: the place evolves as you play — but you still choose how to use it.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

One advantage of researching a game about the Congress of Vienna with far too many books: they double as an excellent book press. Right now two centuries of European diplomacy are gently flattening my glued room tokens.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Yesterday's dilemma: archive the old parts or cannibalise them? For 3.6 I chose fresh — new components for most of the game, 3.5 kept intact in the archive. The exception: the cuisine (refreshments) deck, currently under QA by Fyodor, who won't let go.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Every prototype iteration: archive the old components for history, or glue the new version straight over them? With blank cardboard tokens it's agony — reuse the 3.5 ones or open fresh? I freeze every time. What's your rule?

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Something for the coffee ☕ Vienna, August 1814: bakers roll out a special "congress roll," a kreutzer apiece. One exasperated local noted he'd taken to carrying his spectacles to the tavern — just so the thing might look a little bigger.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Visual Note from the Past: Rudolf von Alt's salon, 1853. Too late for the Congress of Vienna, but the mood is perfect — an intimate room where music, gossip, romance and politics quietly tangle. Exactly the feel I want for the entertainment rooms in Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Sometimes social media feels like fate. A follower sent me scans of hand-drawn Congress of Vienna portraits, after Isabey — by Gonzalo Bénard, photographer and, as it turns out, a shaman who drew them for a descendant of one of the aristocrats pictured. Thank you, Gonzalo.

Jean Baptiste Isabey - Participants at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815

Congress of Vienna participants by Gonzalo Bénard

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Entertainment cards, iteration 3.6: each one shows where it can be hosted. This party is flexible — a room, a park, a public venue — and where you throw it decides how big it gets. First guest to arrive earns a bonus. Congress of Vienna board game, still cooking.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Comparing today's European leaders to the ones at the Congress of Vienna is deeply unfair. History had 200 years to select the dramatic ones. I made the video anyway. (Yes, I'm designing a board game about exactly this.)

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Today is Napoleon's birthday. Genuinely hard for me to weigh — I see the good and the bad and can't say which outweighs the other. But he's unavoidable history: without him there's no Congress of Vienna, no map to redraw, no game for me to design. A complicated happy birthday.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Friedrich von Gentz kept the Congress of Vienna running — the secretary who tracked every obligation and reminded everyone of their duties. My version is a task app called Super Productivity, and it will not let me forget one item on the Vienna 1814 to-do list.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Last day in Lublin — slightly bitten by time, colourful, quietly chaotic. Looked for something clearly 19th-century all day and mostly failed, except maybe this tiled stove. Next week: back to designing Vienna 1814.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Zamość: one of the largest fortresses the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ever built. Besieged five times, taken by storm exactly once — by Poles in 1809, wresting it from Austria in a two-hour night assault. Every other time, it was starved into surrender.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

A View of Vienna from the Prater, Rudolf von Alt, 1834. Not quite 1814 — but the heat is. You can almost hear the crickets and a whole city shimmering in the distance. Research mood for a board game about the Congress of Vienna.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Designing this game means my open browser tabs are either rules questions or 200-year-old scandals, with absolutely nothing in between. Show me your current unhinged tab situation. I promise not to judge. (And yes, Vivaldi tab hibernation is the only reason my laptop still runs.)

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Nominated for the Virtuti Militari — then refused, because she was a woman. She turned down the money they offered. Years later she got the cross anyway: the first woman ever to receive it. I came for the architecture. I'm leaving with a soldier. Let's see what I uncover tomorrow.

Zamość Town Hall at night, floodlit — a white Renaissance building with a tall clock tower, green cupola and a sweeping fan-shaped staircase, on an empty cobbled square.

Zamość's Great Market Square at night: a row of ornate Renaissance townhouses in green, yellow and red, arcades and café umbrellas below, on wet cobblestones.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Her name was Joanna Żubr. She joined the army of the Duchy of Warsaw as a rifleman — in a man's uniform, hiding that she was a woman. On the night of 19–20 May 1809, Polish troops stormed Zamość. Joanna was among the first over the walls, capturing a cannon and opening the way.

A 19th-century engraved portrait of an older woman in a frilled bonnet and dark high-collared dress, a small cross-shaped Virtuti Militari medal on her chest — Joanna Żubr.

An imagined, AI-generated portrait of a woman in an early-19th-century Polish infantry uniform: dark blue coat with red collar and sergeant's stripes, plumed czapka with an eagle badge, sabre in hand, a smoky battlefield behind her.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Zamość — the "Padua of the North," founded 1580. Too hot for photos, so a story instead. Not just a pretty town: a fortress. In May 1809 it was retaken from the Austrians in one night — and among the soldiers on its walls was a woman. Second stop in my 19th-century Poland series.

A laptop on an old wooden desk, screen showing a document open in a writing app; behind it hang two framed pictures — a small 18th-century-style portrait and a sepia illustration of a hare in a frock coat holding a pocket watch.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Round two of Would you survive the Congress of Vienna? — the board game I'm designing about 1814's salon side. The scene's on the card. Drop your move in the comments; the sharpest answer joins the Survival Guide.

A first-person view at a candlelit Viennese ball: a raised glass of red wine in focus, an ornate golden ballroom with blurred guests behind. Text: "Would you survive? You arrive at a Viennese soirée. Within ten minutes someone has insulted you in flawless French, you've been seated below your rank on purpose, and a rumour about you is already three rooms ahead. It isn't even dinner yet. How do you play this?"

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

And the next modern European country I will try to connect to character from Congress of Vienna is...

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Day one: Żyrardów. A town built from the 1830s around a single linen mill. Red brick tenements, factory windows, soft late-afternoon light. Some buildings renovated, some not — and behind a few windows, you can still glimpse a mystery or two.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

On the road to the Congress of Vienna, 1814: stranded by a storm in the worst inn of the trip. Bad bed, worse food — but there was coffee, good cream, and sugar in parchment. Things, Berlinghieri notes, that in these parts are never lacking.

A cup of black coffee on a floral saucer and a small cream jug on a rough, worn dark-wood table in a dim, humble old inn. Beside them, a twist of parchment paper with fine white sugar spilling out, a hard lump of loaf sugar, and old iron sugar nippers. Warm light falls from a window on the left; a lit candle and plain benches stand in the shadows behind.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Rudolf von Alt, A View of Vienna from the Prater, 1834 — the city about twenty years after the Congress of Vienna, seen across summer fields. The same skyline my board game keeps dragging me back into. St. Stephen's still on watch.

Watercolour landscape: Vienna seen from a distance on a summer day. In the foreground, a grassy hill with trees and three figures resting — a man in a top hat standing, two people seated on the grass. In the middle distance, a farmer plows a field with horses. On the horizon, the low silhouette of the city stretches across, with the spire of St. Stephen's Cathedral rising near the centre under a wide sky full of soft summer clouds.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Vienna, 1814. An Italian diplomat visits the Prater days after arriving and writes home: "men and women of every age... keep turning for hours together, without ever laughing." Grown adults. Wooden horses. Dead serious faces. Convention, cultural distance, or just a different kind of fun?

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

After Vienna, Berlinghieri became guardian to Giulia — daughter of Anna, to whom he'd written all those letters. A French writer asked for her hand. The only proposal he ever made: Henri Beyle. Stendhal. The polite, firm no came from the man missing from every index.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

New magic die round, list empty. Last one led me to a forgotten eyewitness account of the Congress — I am still reading his letters. Suggest a European country. At six, the die decides.

Magic die near old map of Europe, lighted candle, and board games in the background

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

He never got Malta back. He mentions his mission's failure once — in a parenthesis, next to expense money. Two centuries later, he's one of the few voices from that Congress I can hear clearly. They sent him to lose. He lost. That's part of why I can read him today.

View of Vienna from the Bisamberg – Friedrich Loos

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

"How can it move forward if it never stops dancing" — said of Prince de Ligne in late November. Two weeks later, same pen: the prince died last night. His funeral account — 12,000 men under arms, thirty cannons — is the most detailed I've found anywhere.

Ferdinand Jagemann - Portrait of Charles Joseph Prince de Ligne

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

I asked for countries for Faces of Vienna. The die landed on Malta. Plan: give the Order of Malta its usual one paragraph. Landless order, lost cause, footnote. Then I found the letters.

Vue du grand port prise de la Valette à Malte Alberto Pullicino

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Shoutout to Super Productivity — free, open source, and the only thing keeping iteration 3.6 from collapsing into chaos. Sample task from my list: "Split attractions 50/50 into engines and flat effects." It keeps even that in order. Great app.

Screenshot of the Super Productivity task app, open on the "Iteracja 3.6" project — my task list for the current iteration of the board game. Tasks are in Polish; the visible one near the top reads "Podziel atrakcje 50/50 na silniki i płaskie" (Split attractions 50/50 into engines and flat effects).

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Some borders at the Congress of Vienna were decided between the dances, not at the table. Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations — a board game in the making about the half of the Congress that happened at the ball.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Baked a Sachertorte: supposedly made in 1832 for Metternich, of Congress-of-Vienna fame. Except the origin story was probably invented decades later by the baker's son as marketing — the man himself said he made it years later, elsewhere entirely. History refusing to cooperate, again.

Baking ingredients on a wooden board by a window: brown eggs in a carton, bars of dark chocolate, a jar of apricot jam, butter on a floral plate, a carton of cream, a cup of sugar, a bowl of flour, vanilla sugar, baking powder, and a bag of flaked almonds. A potted plant stands behind. The almonds are here purely for the photo — they never made it into the cake. Some delegations at the Congress achieved less.

A round chocolate cake under a dark chocolate glaze, its surface marked with soft spatula swirls, on a clear fluted glass plate set on a light wooden board.

The same dark chocolate cake on a glass plate on a white tablecloth, two slices already cut, a metal cake server resting beside it, with patterned napkins, a spoon and a glass nearby.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

The Congress Dances… but does not progress. Metternich threw endless balls at the Congress of Vienna — partly so rivals had no time to scheme. Humboldt hated every minute. Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations, my board game in progress, treats the parties not as downtime, but as the machinery of politics.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Board game about the Congress of Vienna, still in development. The magic die picks a country, I do a deep dive into a real historical figure tied to it. It just chose the next one. 🎲

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Would you survive the Congress of Vienna? A board game in the making — 1814 from the salon side: gossip, romance, intrigue, real people. Answer in the comments. The most-voted reply makes it into a free Survival Guide I'm putting together.

Dark candlelit palace room, a door ajar onto a glowing ballroom with dancers. Text: "Would you survive? A ball, 1814. Everyone is smiling and nobody means it. Someone asks your opinion on a treaty you haven't read. You have three seconds. What comes out of your mouth?"

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Visual Note from the Past: a ball scene by Karl Eversberg, date unknown. Not exactly 1814 — but the chandeliers, the colour of the gowns and the dreamlike blur of the dancers are the precise mood I want for Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

The final committee space rewards completed political objectives, not the speed of arrival. Being first means little if you brought nothing.

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Wandering Pine Games @wanderingpinegames.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Solo playtesting Vienna 1814 through a heatwave. Told myself I'd escape to a cooler Vienna in my head — and for once the research agreed: the 1810s were the coldest summer decade Central Europe had seen in three centuries. The past, smug about it.

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