Crowns Edge is a kingdom-building strategy game about the gap between ruling a place and ruling the people in it. You'll run an economy, but what actually ends your reign is a person you forgot to pay attention to.
The first morning of spring, before anything goes wrong
You inherit a small kingdom: a Keep, a handful of houses, and a population that grows, works, worships, gossips, and occasionally decides you're the problem. You build the economy, place the roads, set the wages, pass the laws, and hold the throne together. Meanwhile your subjects live lives you only partly control, and other real players can walk into your streets with very different plans for your kingdom.
It's a management game where the management is the easy part. The hard part is the people: their loyalty, their faith, their estate's approval of you, the gang forming in your Market district, and the spy who's been in your kingdom for three seasons without you noticing.
Spring 1203Reginald of house Hartwell has turned to crime.
Summer 1203Gang war: the Iron Jackals and the Bramblewick Boys are killing each other in the streets.
Fall 1203No Guard remains to defend the Crown. The rebels turn on the King himself!
Winter 1203The coup has succeeded. The traitors lay down their swords before the new Crown.
One kingdom. One bad year.
Crowns Edge sits at the intersection of a city-builder's construction and economy loop, a political-simulation game's faction and approval systems, and a life-sim's individually tracked population. The world keeps running and keeps making stories whether or not you're looking at that corner of the map.
Every named villager on your Almanac screen is a full character with a job, a house, traits, and a memory of how you've treated their class. Politics aren't a single "approval" meter: Peasantry, Nobility, and Clergy each judge you on their own terms, and a policy that pleases one can push another toward a coup. And unlike a single-player kingdom sealed off from the world, another real player can connect to yours and infiltrate it: casing houses, running crime, joining your rebels, or coming after the crown itself. You hold court in a real throne room, try criminals in the Hall of Justice and, if it comes to that, execute them on the Scaffold in front of a crowd.
Crowns Edge is being built and published by DreamedAboutGames, currently in active development. The game is built from the ground up around a simulated population first. The buildings, economy and invasions all exist to give those villagers something worth living through.
The Deep Dive breaks down every system, from wages to the Scaffold.