Write Warz is the recently launched debut title of Boltz Entertainment, a co-op party game that turns the act of storytelling into strategic (and often funny) warfare against your opponents. Building on the tradition of Jackbox-style titles like Quiplash or RiffTrax, Write Warz instead offers a longer-form avenue of storytelling between friends, as up to 6 players can join together to build the narrative. The game launches on Steam in early access on March 6, with horror and pirate-based themes.

Each game within Write Warz is a round robin-style iteration where every round, the players each contribute a sentence or two. The winner’s writing is added the story, and so on, with each story’s prompt being determined by the in-game “setting” — pirate-themed, horror-themed, etc. Each player has a chosen avatar who, if the player’s sentence is chosen, can bestow a buff or debuff on themselves and other players. Depending on the type of game chosen, there can be other complications, such as extra objectives in the form of words or in-round attacks players can use to shorten their opponent’s time or word count.

Richard Boltz, CEO of Boltz Entertainment, told GamesBeat more about the game’s origins, specifically how it was inspired by a Naval tradition his father told him about: “This is the 70s, so there’s no cell phones. So what they would do was they had these ledgers in their work shift. They would have two people working a job, and then after eight or 10 hours, they would have two new people that would relieve them. When the two new people came into the work shift, they had a ledger with a sentence wrote in it, and the two new people would add two new sentences into the story. This continued throughout the week, and it was what they looked forward to the most in their entire shift. It became such a hit in in my dad’s little work area that it became a ship-wide thing where the crew chief would read that story at the end of the week to the entire crew.”

Beating writer’s block with the help of friends

At present, the game has two themes, or different types of stories for players to write: Horror, which borrows from Lovecraftian-style novels for its prompts; and Pirate Adventure, with prompts about swashbuckling tales on the high seas. According to the game’s Steam page, Boltz is making other themes, including an anime-inspired Elves vs. Samurai theme. Each round has unique mechanics that shake up the gameplay — Pirate Adventure, for example, has a between-rounds mechanic that allows players to purchase offensive or defensive items to use in-round against each other.

Boltz also noted that Write Warz need not necessarily be played in a party setting — the game has both online matchmaking for those comfortable playing with random people, and AI bots trained with language models who can serve as opponents. Both came from player feedback. “When we put the demo online, we noticed that a lot of people didn’t necessarily have a friend group that they could play with… we’ve added AI into the game if you want it. If you don’t have enough players and you want to play against bots, you can play the game by yourself. If you’re in a custom game and you only have two people, but you want to play with six, you can add the AI bots, and they’ll interact just like a human would. We’ve even programmed custom personalities into the game, so we have over 30 different writing styles that the bots will use. Some bots will rhyme. Some bots will write like they’re a Greek philosopher. Some of them will write like their Tolkien. People wanted that in the game, and so we added it.”

According to the developer, it’s also working on other items players want, including streamer integrations and a potential drinking game mode. “We’ve heard everything from, ‘You need to have this in the schools, because you’ve gamified creative writing.’ We’ve heard, ‘You need to have the drinking mode.’ If there’s a group of writers that have writer’s block, they could all sit here and go into a custom game mode and all try to figure out what to write next. It could be used for screenwriting and making movies. There’s a million uses for the game, and we’re trying to check boxes for everyone.”