Eador: Masters of the Broken World gives you a peculiar way to cooperate: you and another Master can enter a shard as rivals, then form an alliance and fight alongside one another. Its shared-screen co-op is turn-based hotseat, and Steam Remote Play Together lets a friend join that same pass-and-play session remotely. The alliance is temporary, though, and the game does not turn its solo Astral campaign into a shared story campaign. Eador fits friends who want a deliberate strategy game with negotiation and an eventual winner, not a conventional party adventure where everyone keeps the same team to the credits.
One shard, several Masters
Eador’s fantasy universe is broken into floating worlds called shards. A shard is a self-contained strategic map made of hexagonal provinces, with its own strongholds, neutral settlements, monsters, and hidden places. In a Shard Game, each human Master begins with a capital and a small foothold, then expands across the map. The broad objective is to defeat rival Masters by taking their strongholds. You can also forge an alliance with another Master. While the pact lasts, the two of you fight alongside each other rather than trying to purge each other from the shard. The alliance gives both players a shared objective within a competitive match, but it does not promise a joint victory.
There is a separate Battle Mode for a single custom army fight. It skips the wider map’s gradual expansion and focuses on the tactical encounter itself, so it offers a shorter way to compare armies without developing a shard first. That mode is player-versus-player combat rather than the alliance-led cooperation described here. A campaign is another distinct format: it follows one Master through a sequence of shard conquests and story choices, but is for one player. The menus and store categories can make “co-op” sound broader than it is, so the distinction matters if your group is looking for a full shared campaign.
Hotseat keeps the map on one computer and hands control from one player to the next. Steam Remote Play Together can stream that same pass-and-play session to friends on other computers, so remote players still take turns through the shared screen. Native online Shard Game matches are another option, though current official matchmaking availability is uncertain. A community patch adds LAN play, including through virtual-LAN tools; those routes need separate setup. In-person hotseat needs no server. Remote Play Together is the clearest remote route, with everyone sharing one screen and taking turns.
A turn stretches from stronghold to wilderness
Each player’s stronghold is the economic center of a shard. You use it to hire heroes, recruit soldiers, improve the settlement, and unlock options for later turns. The four basic hero classes—Warrior, Scout, Commander, and Mage—shape different approaches to exploration and combat. Heroes lead armies because soldiers cannot roam the map alone. Their class and skills affect army size, movement and fighting strengths, while equipment gives them another layer of development.
A hero normally has one main action in a turn: moving, attacking a province, exploring a site, or taking another available action. That limit makes the map feel like a sequence of choices rather than a stream of orders. You and your friend can each see the other’s expansion unfold, but the alliance does not erase the structure of separate turns. While one Master is deciding whether to explore a ruin or claim a border province, the other has time to look over a stronghold queue, inspect units, or follow the wider map—though in hotseat the active player’s decisions remain visible to everyone.
Neutral provinces are the first obstacles between a capital and the rest of a shard. Some can be taken through diplomacy; others have defenders that make a fight unavoidable. Exploring a province reveals points of interest such as ruins, dungeons, and other encounters. Those locations can pay out money, magical gems, equipment, experience, or other resources. A battle may open the path to a new territory, but clearing every province is not the only route to victory: capturing an enemy capital can decide the shard. That keeps the strategic map focused on the rival strongholds even as your heroes spend time clearing nearby sites and building strength.
The map also offers a steady stream of small decisions outside combat. Settlements ask for protection or investment; random events can present a moral choice or an unexpected threat. You can negotiate with local inhabitants, build structures that improve province income, or recruit guards to defend vulnerable holdings. These systems make an alliance useful for more than a shared battle screen: two Masters can pursue their own economic and exploration plans while the pact changes who is a current enemy. But the same events and diplomacy are also part of the game’s broader, sometimes opaque rule set, rather than a streamlined co-op quest system.
Battles bring the armies into close view
When armies meet, the view shifts to a separate hex-grid battlefield. Each side deploys individual units around its hero, and terrain, position, stamina, morale, equipment, and special abilities all affect what happens. This is not a fight resolved by clicking a single army stack. Units act in groups by faction, and a move can expose one soldier while opening space for another. Heroes can use spells and abilities, while troops bring their own attacks and traits. The resulting encounters have more detail than the strategic map’s province markers suggest.
A Master alliance does not combine both players’ armies into one controllable force. Instead, it changes the political relationship on the shard: allied Masters can fight alongside each other against remaining opponents and manage their own heroes, troops, and strongholds. If you play hotseat, the turn handoff and separate decision-making are part of the session. Both formats keep the match centered on a shared shard rather than a persistent campaign. Cooperation means coordinating across the map and maintaining a pact between rival rulers; it does not mean taking joint control of each tactical unit.
Armies grow through both the stronghold and the battlefield. Buildings unlock new unit types, magic, equipment, or economic improvements, and there are limits on which higher-rank options a particular stronghold can support. Individual units can gain experience and abilities, while heroes earn levels and improve through class-specific choices. A soldier who has survived several fights can represent a meaningful investment, so a battle’s result can shape what you can afford and field later. The stronghold’s recruitment choices and a hero’s equipment also help distinguish two players’ forces, even when they started with the same broad class options.
That growth is tied to the current shard. In the solo Astral campaign, conquering a shard can expand your Master’s world and affect the sequence of later encounters. A multiplayer Shard Game instead plays out around one shared map; it is not a parallel version of the full campaign with persistent joint progress between sessions. The separately sold Allied Forces DLC adds units, but it is not required to describe the base modes here. These boundaries help set expectations: Eador offers a broad cooperative alliance inside a competitive shard match, while most long-term story progression belongs to single-player.
The world rewards patience—and asks for it
Eador pairs a stark cosmic backdrop with a detailed medieval fantasy map. Shards drift through an empty Astral space, then open into landscapes divided by bright provincial borders. Strongholds, forests, coasts, ruins, and hostile territories sit close together on the same board. The contrast makes expansion legible: you can see where your territory ends and the next uncertain province begins. In battles, the separate hex-grid view makes the armies and terrain the focus, with magic effects and fantasy creatures lending the fights a more theatrical edge.
The tone mixes high stakes with occasional dry humor in its events and dialogue. A province may demand resources, ask for protection, or react to a strange local incident; those interruptions can make the map feel inhabited rather than like a blank field of conquest. The same event system can be unpredictable: a choice that seems harmless may not lead to the result you expect. If your group mainly wants a smooth, tightly scripted co-op arc, the open-ended succession of map decisions can feel indirect. If you like seeing a friend’s Master negotiate, build up, and contest the same world, that messier pace is central to the game’s character.
There is also plenty of variation across shard matches. Maps, province layouts, neutral factions, available buildings, and points of interest change what each local expansion can look like. The four hero classes give you different ways to lead, and their later specializations, spells, equipment, and unit choices add more room to shape an army. A random map can also produce uneven starts or a difficult early matchup, which players have criticized. Replay value comes from discovering how the pieces fit on a new shard, but the same unpredictability can make a match feel less carefully balanced than a fixed competitive map.
Is Eador a fit for your group?
Eador is a strong match if your friends enjoy long, turn-based strategy sessions and are comfortable with an alliance that may end with one person taking the win. Hotseat puts players around one computer, while Remote Play Together can carry that same visible pass-and-play format to a distance. Current native online matchmaking availability is uncertain, and LAN play requires the community patch. For the most straightforward remote option, Remote Play Together avoids relying on the older official matchmaking server, with the tradeoff that your friend sees your turns.
The game’s systems have a substantial learning curve, and its interface can leave details hard to parse. Tactical battles, hero growth, and province management give the rules a lot of texture, but the volume of systems, repeated encounters, slow pacing, and random-map fairness can also make the experience uneven. Eador asks your party to spend a lot of time working through a dense strategy game together, so it fits best when that kind of deliberation is part of the appeal. If yes, the alliance between Masters gives that shared map a genuine cooperative thread. If you want equal partners on a fully co-op campaign, a cleaner ruleset, or fast turns, this is a much more competitive and complicated proposition.