Reigns

Reigns is a management game for the casual player, with your choices being limited to "yes/no", and you only having four values to worry about - the amount of money your kingdom has, and the approval you have with the church, the people and the army. If your approval is at zero, you get overthrown, although you can get overthrown when the value is at a maximum - such as when the church becomes too powerful. If done right, it can become fairly engrossing, but Reigns simply has too many problems to allow someone to play for more than 20 minutes at a time, at most. The first problem being just how few choices you get with the base game, and the lack of control over which choices will be presented to you. It seems like each choice is drawn at random, unrelated to any previous choice you have made. Playing this game for an extended period of time, you will eventually come across the same choices over and over again. You can unlock new ones as you keep playing, but you shouldn't be forced to play the game over and over again, just so achievements can be shoved into the game. It turns Reigns into a game of statistics, showing you how many different people you met, how many times you died, how long was your reign, etc. If you simply want to play a fun game, you'll have to alternate between playing casually, to playing to unlock new content, to make the game less stale. The game also relies far too heavily on comedy. In itself it isn't a bad thing, despite me wanting a serious game, but it leads far too often to uninformed choices - guesswork. Such as when two pigeons start speaking to you and it's up to you to decide which one is speaking the truth. You also get the occasional report from your kingdom, and you need to decide if it's true or not. Due to the comedy, outlandish claims can turn out to have been true - such as someone building a golem. If you make the wrong decision, you're punished for guessing wrong. Also, in some scenarios you don't really have a choice.

I was looking for a simple game that would help me unwind after a long day. I bought Reigns and it was a mistake. In this game you click left or right to make a decision. You are informed that your decision will influence some of the 4 stats. Let one of those 4 get to 0 or to 100 and you are dead. Problem is, some decisions influence the stats in the manner that is not logical. Army stat will decline despite you just did something that in real world would strenghten it etc. So in order to be successful in this game you have to remember which decision does what. And given the number of decisions, you have to keep notes - I choose to use good old pen and notepad. But I wouldn't call the game fun. It's more of a chore. It gets boring really fast too, as the decisions you are faced with keep repeating themselves. Also, sometimes you have to make decisions ASAP as one or more stat is constantly rising / falling due to a buff you got (you cannot decline it if you don't know what answer will give it to you). You can defend yourself against it if you memorized all of the answers, but if you happen to roam through catacombs during that time, you are more or less destined to die. So no, I wouldn't recommend Reings. Check the YT playthrough before buying if you are interested. And remember, it gets boring really fast. In 1h you will see everything the game has to offer.

This game is great to play it while talking to your friends or just relaxing a bit. It has no action in it, but you really need to use your brain to always find the sweet spot between church, citizens, army and money and that's harder than you might think. This game is quite challenging and I am addicted to it. For that price, it's totally worth it!

This one was a great surprise, for two bucks (less than one if on sale). The premises are all there: you are a king who has all a reign in his hands, and every choice matter for your life and your kingdom. In this game you'll die... a lot: every time you'll make a bad choice the folk, the church or the army will get angry and may attack you in different ways, and if you die you'll impersonate another king and so on. After just a couple of hours you'll get bored about that, but you can always come back every time you don't know what to play :)

A deceivingly complex game with an extreme amount of polish. Unless you dislike the genre, you ought to enjoy this one. From graphics, atmosphere, music and unobtrusive Simlish-like voice overs, to flavor texts on the cards—all perfect. Well, almost, but more on that at the end. As a card-based game, it's natural to expect some randomness, but it is a "curated randomness". You do have direct control over what happens in most instances, many cards trigger specific events, give you specific status effects, make specific cards appear or become available. Most of your choices *will* be purposeful. Moreover, each decision shows its rough effect on the 4 stats you have to keep within 0 and 100 in order to survive. You rarely depend on sheer luck, beyond not knowing what card comes next when no fixed series of cards is currently active. But even the pool of available cards is partially under your control. So, why the -1⚝? Basically, there is an important dungeon which requires luck to even enter, has a strict real-time limit, randomized chests, randomized paths, and a lot of fencing, result of which is random too. And unless it's just me, it's super easy to assume the dungeon is not important, only when you try everything else to get the best ending you might start to think "ok, it's probably the dungeon after all". Game Design Lesson: NEVER EVER force the player to face low-chance RNG and unknowable trial-error actions accessible only after they complete a series of events that are *also* random and/or require time-consuming preparation, let alone give misleading hints that might make the player go "heureka!", only to repeatedly undergo this ordeal and try performing the "correct" action in several ways. Especially not if it involves the main storyline... ____ P.S.: If you are not a completionist and using a walkthrough or leaving the game at "99%" doesn't bother you, ignore this last bit and make it 5⚝.