Is being released on PC, iOS and Android tonight and I’m excited. I’m a mature man approaching 40 but I’m going to stay up past midnight for the sole purpose of downloading this silly app. Why? Let me explain.
Reigns is a very simple game, you have 4 stats to be concerned with and you simply go through a deck of cards making a decision with ‘swipe right’ or ‘swipe left’ when each card appears and that decision affects those statistics and in the mean time tells the story of your characters reign. Depending on the decisions that you make the deck is modified, cards are taken out, put in or changed and not only does the story grow the decision space does as well. The game may end up being a disappointing trifle, but I’ve been waiting for something like it my whole life.
Medieval court intrigue has interested me since I was a child. The secrets, the back stabbing, lust for power, the complicated web of consequences pulling at every decision a monarch makes is dramatic and is just naturally fertile ground for games. It started with Castles II for me, while the design focus was on building mighty castles and sending your armies off for conquest the interesting part was the plot lines your leader had to navigate. Simple things like peasents asking you to adjudicate a dispute, spies sending you word, or bandits ambushing travelling townsfolk. Sure, after awhile you learned to min/max the handful of plots possible to get the best result, but that part made the game come alive. Later, it was Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings but I never found that intimate court drama I was looking for so I turned to board games** Republic of Rome**, Down with the King and The King is Dead where the closest I could get but just required a lot of people with patience and acting flare to work. So yeah, they never saw the table much in my house.
Anyway, thought someone here might be in the same boat and would want to know about this. I sure hope it doesn’t suck, but who knows, if nothing else it might drive another developer to improve on the idea.