Buckriders: Night Raid

Night falls over the borderland and the bucks come out. You pull on a skull mask with curled horns, swing up onto a black goat and ride straight off the ridge. Its hooves strike invisible road in the air and throw red and yellow fire behind you. Below, a bell starts ringing.

Buckriders: Night Raid is set in a compressed borderland of white marl, wet cobbles, orchard walls and deep lanes under beech roots, drawn from the country around Kerkrade and Valkenburg on the Geul. Austrian guards walk the patrols, the levy waits in Hill Chapel's store, and the crew banks its haul in a limestone quarry refuge. You ride as the horned Night Raider in a red-lined black cloak, the Road Bandit in a brown coat and wide-brimmed hat, or the Blue Outlaw.

Pick a contract at the board and choose one goat ability, one hand tool and up to two spells. Then ride or fly in alone or with up to three friends. Lift a latch quietly or ram the gate, crack the strongbox, and decide whether the two optional sacks are worth the detour while the alarm climbs from Unseen to Alert to Hunted. Then race home and hold the bank marker in the caves. Every raid runs against a twelve-minute hard dawn, and only the haul you are carrying is ever at risk.

The flight is real. There is no travel movie: on the Night Road to Kerkrade you choose your road. Skim the Geul and dive under the bridge arch, run the mill ridge past turning post mills, or climb the moon stair to a high road over a sea of cloud while lantern cones swing from the watch towers. Leap the broken causeway, then brake and land on the abbey court. Before a raid, the crew can swear an optional oath at a field wall as threads of light join every rider to the waiting goats.

The first release is built around three contracts that teach three different jobs. The Tollhouse Silver Run is a robbery. In the Hoensbroek rescue, smoke covers the crew while three captives are led out of the pen and escorted to safety. In the Tax Convoy, you stop the levy cart on the open river road or in the sunken lane. The Night Road flight joins all three. Raids are built for one to four riders and scale down for solo play, with no friendly fire and no loot stealing inside the crew. Later contracts follow: The Recruit in the deep forest, the Requisition Annex, Beukenholt's quarry, the Lost Galleries, Maastricht's Wyck storehouse and the Four Doors breakout below the castle.

Banked stuivers buy permanent sidegrades in the refuge: a boarding axe, a smoke charm, a bell decoy, a still veil or an air feint, alongside the baton and rope hook every rider starts with. Wins unlock the Leaper and Veil goat abilities next to the starting Breaker. The Gallop tiers turn your hoof fire from Kindled to Blaze to Wildfire: a faster burst, but brighter fire that guards spot from further away. Mastery feats, earned masks and goat styles such as the Marl Ghost, which sometimes fades almost invisible, give you reasons to ride every contract again.

Based on The Buckriders by C.P.J. Schurgers. The masked riders, the goats that run on air and the borderland around Kerkrade come from the novels. The crew oath and the red and yellow hoof fire are the game's own, and the books' cold silver-white fire returns as the earned Moonfire.

Buckriders: Night Raid is in development for Roblox.