About
BOLT League is a new type of game unlike anything you've experienced before, in which a game runner (the Commissioner) builds a custom trading card game for a league of players. Players compete in this game over a period of many weeks, earning League Points for winning matches, until a winner is crowned.
BOLT League is also a text-based role-playing game, as players make up characters and interact through chat messages. Players' real-life identities are kept hidden from one another so that all interactions are in-character (and if you let your identity slip, others can unmask you for League Points).
Players trade cards, form alliances, and solve elaborate puzzles strewn throughout all elements of the game.
BOLT League is more than the sum of its parts, though. When you bring all of these elements together into a game that lasts several months and can be played in the background of your life at all hours of the day, it becomes a life-changing experience... quite literally so, as the sheer amount of time it can suck up is enough to change your daily life on its own!
For a more in-depth explanation, check out the talk Andrew gave at Metagame 2026 (link coming soon).
When Can I Play?
BOLT League is still in development, and isn't available as a publicly-accessible product yet. We are (very tentatively) targeting 2028 for the initial launch.
If you'd like to hear when the product is ready for general use, or if you'd like to sign up to be a playtester for the website, please fill out this survey.
Playtest spots are very limited, as we plan to support playtest Commissioners by implementing new website features and personally providing guidance about how to run a great season of BOLT League.
While you're waiting for the BOLT League website to be ready, we encourage you to try running your own version of the game! The first season of BOLT League was run without any sort of fancy website automating anything, using Google Slides for anonymous cardplay. To learn more about how you could do this, check out the presentation Andrew gave at Metagame 2026 (link coming soon) about exactly that! If you do, we'd love to hear about it — email us at battleoflegendarytitans@gmail.com to let us know how it goes.
Modules
Each BOLT League season is run using a module that sets up all of its gameplay elements. As the game runner, you can make your own module or can use a pre-built module that we provide.
The BOLT League website is incredibly flexible. At a minimum, you could start playing with very little preparation and add to the module as you play, inventing rules and systems as you go and implementing them primarily through text communication with your players. This style of season is less work to prepare up front, but will take a lot more time and energy from the Commissioner during play. Or, you could spend months building an extremely elaborate module with almost all of its systems fully automated, custom art for every card and environment, secrets and puzzles woven into every aspect of the game, and programmable components that turn the game into something approaching a visual novel or point-and-click adventure.
Our pre-built modules will be on the more elaborate side of the spectrum, giving you the best of both worlds: minimal preparation before the season, minimal effort to administer the game during the season, and an epic scope with endless content to explore and puzzles to solve.
Here's a teaser image for our first pre-made module that is currently in development:
AI Policy
BOLT League is a production of Curious Coterie, a creative studio dedicated to creating novel experiences centered around human connection. We believe that art is made by people.
Every word you read on this website was written by a human. Every piece of visual art was made by a human.
We do use LLM-based coding tools for aspects of software development and the programming of this website, but only for writing code to implement features we decided on. AI is not used for any form of idea generation or making decisions that affect your experience. All choices about what to show you on the website, and how, were made by humans.
Curious Coterie is composed of Andrew Nathenson, a professional software engineer with a passion for game design and novel writing; and Mark Boyanowski, a professional video editor, lifelong artist, and lover of visual storytelling. This AI policy is a product of the combination of our backgrounds in the artistic and engineering worlds, and it reflects how we currently believe it is ethical to use AI. That said, our use of AI for writing code, a task we believe it to be well-suited for, is not without ethical considerations: its impact on the environment, and the use of content in training data without permission, to name two. We will continue to consider these and other issues. If we make changes to this policy in the future, we will make it very clear what has changed, when it changed, and why.