Kingdoms Reborn Grow a kingdom, outgrow your friends

You start with a handful of settlers and a patch of land, and grow through the Dark Age, Middle Age, Enlightenment Age and Industrial Age. Each era unlocks new buildings, bonuses and upgrades to research, so your town keeps changing shape: what worked as a village needs rethinking once factories exist. The goal is not just more people but more advanced ones, since some research asks for citizens whose homes have reached a certain standard. There is a real pleasure in looking at a settlement you founded centuries of game-time ago and seeing how far it has come.

Every map is procedurally generated, and where you start matters. Forest, Jungle, Desert, Savanna, Boreal Forest and Tundra each bring their own challenges and opportunities, so your opening moves change with the terrain. You are not locked to your starting patch either: provinces can be bought and claimed once you can afford them, and fertile land, coal, gems or luxury crops are worth reaching for. If the map runs out, colonies can be established overseas, up to a thousand tiles away. No two runs start the same way.

For the city builder at heart, this is a game about roads, districts and production chains that actually run. Citizens are simulated individually, and you can watch them hauling goods across the map, which makes the economy feel like a living thing rather than a spreadsheet with pictures. Detailed yearly charts break down production and population growth before you commit to big decisions, and a statistics building lets you check on things at any time. Five cultures, from Duchies and Emirates to Norsemen, Shogunate and Tlatoa, each bring their own art and playstyle to build around.

Your settlers have needs, and meeting them is the whole game. Food, housing, goods and services all have to keep pace with a growing population, and advancing an era means raising citizens' standard of living, not just your building count. The card system shapes your choices: buildings, actions, policies and bonuses come as drawn cards, so each draw is a fresh set of options rather than a menu of everything at once. You can pay to draw more over time, and deciding what to chase and what to skip is where your kingdom's character comes from.

Starting location is a survival puzzle in itself. A tundra start and a jungle start ask for different plans, and the map rewards adapting rather than repeating one formula. Since no patch of land produces everything, trade is built into the game: you will want to specialise in what your terrain does well and buy or barter for the rest. Claiming new provinces for their resources, and founding overseas colonies when the home region runs dry, keeps the expansion going long past the point where most builders would be done.

Multiplayer runs in real time for up to 18 players, and it works both ways. Compete to see who builds the most advanced kingdom, or join forces on a single shared kingdom, blending your plans into one. Two players can even run the same civilisation, one designing a mountain mining town while the other works the research table. Long-time players keep coming back to it as a group game, and it is easy to see why: watching a friend's population chart spike while everyone else's stays flat is its own kind of comedy.