The fifth episode of a short series on games I discovered at EGX Rezzed 2016.
Reigns from developer Nerial is an incredibly simple game. You’re the king and each year you get to make a binary choice. There are explicit numeric impacts to many of these choices which are shown at the top of display – religion, population, military and treasury. If any of these drop to zero, well it’s bye bye to the king (again, that’s you). Now this might sound like a numbers game so dry you could put cheese on it and call it a healthy after meal snack, but Nerial has dreamt a little bigger, darling.
The numerical impact is sometimes unknown with an insipid grey question mark standing in for a number. And not all of the consequences are numerical in nature. After defeating the Vikings I had the choice of executing the whole jolly lot of them or showing some compassion and letting them run free. Well, guess what. After I let them go, they turned up again a couple of years later, back for more blood. So much for compassion.
My early impression is that it’s better to treat it as a random story generator where you’re trying hard to spin the story out as long as possible. From what I understand, there are a vast number of cards in the Reigns deck, which means it’ll be a long time before you’ve exhausted its magic. But most importantly, Reigns is a funny game. By restricting the descriptions of each decision card to just a few lines, there’s an inherent comic value in reducing serious decisions to a tweet-like question. From what I could tell, everyone found Reigns charming and loveable. Whether that stretches into something more strategic, I don’t know. But perhaps that doesn’t really matter.
Reigns is still in development. Release for Steam, iOS and Android is scheduled for the summer.
Interested in the other games I dabbled with? Check out the series index!
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Damn it, I forgot to play this! Looks great and perfect for mobile.
I got confused at Rezzed and claimed Francois Alliot was one half of the team who made Out There. I’m an idiot: Alliot is nothing to do with Mi-Clos, but is rather a friendly chap who I exchanged a number of emails with concerning an earlier game, Devouring Stars – a somewhat obtuse but interesting and fun game. I think I wrote about it on AR early last year.
I also liked Reigns and found it charming. I look forward to seeing how far the concept can be taken.
The Out There devs were showing off Antioch Scarlet Bay I believe, an ‘online cooperative interactive fiction game’ (async too!) which looked really interesting.
http://antiochgame.com/
Oh, that sounds intriguing. Right up my street, and right up Claire’s. 🙂
Hai and I played it for a bit and really enjoyed it so we signed up to the their newsletter/mailing list.