9 Kings Early Access Review
9 Kings is a deck building, city building, synergy building combo that manages to find a sweet spot in a mix of genres. I played hours of the game while traveling in June and while it remains in early access there’s already a lot to like. If you’re looking for a game that leans into synergies and has enough difficulty settings to keep everyone happy then 9 kings is worth checking out.
While I did call 9 kings a deck builder, its not really about decks in the same way as many others in the genre. You, the king, are given a choice each turn from a few cards which can create, or augment your city. These cards can be buildings, armies or power ups. You build your city and it’s defenses and each turn you face an army from a random challenger king. As turns progress the armies you face become more difficult, culminating with a boss fight at turn 33 which lets you play on into endless mode if you win.
As of writing this seven of the nine planned kings are playable, all with a unique set of cards, gimmicks and strategies. You’re not locked into just your own king, defeating an enemy army will give you a choice of cards from that king’s deck, allowing you to mix and match the best from each of the kings. There are other mechanics like a perk system, blessings and royal decrees, all of which tweak the rules slightly to help you build a kingdom set to output higher and higher damage numbers.
The perk system, especially in it’s latest iteration is quite good. Each king has a unique set of perks and you can unlock some shared meta-perks which do things like double the effect of other perks. The other systems in the game, blessings and royal decrees feel a little bit undebaked at this point.
Royal decrees happen regularly as you progress and are similar to the relic system in games like Slay the Spire. Each king has a few unique decrees and there is a shared set of generic ones like increasing army hp by a fixed percentage. What’s lacking here for me is a good set of synergies between choices. They’re all okay on their own but it often feels like the best option is to get as many copies of the one decree as you can.
The blessing mechanic feels almost entirely pointless. It happens once per play through and causes one of a few fixed events to happen several turns later. This could be doubling the army size or leveling up any building on one of a few currently empty spaces in your city. Completing these blessings successfully rarely feels like it makes a difference and when they happen only once in a long game they’re quickly forgotten.
Each of the seven current kings feels different enough that they’re all worth playing. Strategies that work well with one will fall over with another. I’ve found that as I unlocked higher and higher difficulty levels each of the kings came in and out of fashion. Sometimes those higher difficulty scenarios pushed me to try something different with a king, opening my eyes to a fun new way to combine their strengths.
The game’s difficulty levels are fairly simple at this stage. Each time you complete turn 33 on a difficulty setting it unlocks the next one. Typically this means that enemy armies scale in size and strength faster. Combining this with endless mode means that you’re unlikely to ever truly break through and win every battle. You might have a setup that breezes through battles for a while but eventually enemies become too string even for the best combinations.
While this ramp in difficulty helps keep things challenging it can feels a little simple after a while, especially once you unlock the King difficulties which then become King 2, King 3 and so on. I’d love to see something akin to the heat system in Hades as a replacement for these higher settings, allowing players to tweak how the difficulty scales in a more interesting way.
The game has menu items for challenge mode and ranked mode, both of which are still a work in progress. I can see a challenge mode working well by giving the player a limited subset of cards, perks and decrees. I imagine this will be a good way to keep the game interesting long after people have maxed out their kings and difficulty settings.
I’ll wait and see what ranked mode looks like but I think it could be an interesting option if it was anything like the asynchronous multiplayer in He is Coming [LINK ME]. Letting players face each other’s armies at set turn numbers, interspersed with regular battles could make for interesting game play.
I mostly played 9 Kings on my steam deck while traveling around Europe. It’s a great game to pick up and put down because each round is fairly short and you can leave a game mid way through without much hassle. The controls are definitely optimized for a mouse and keyboard but the developers mention they’re looking to add more controller support in the future.
The studio, Sad Socket, looks to have been making games for a while now. While none of the other titles are games I recognize they seem to have had success over the years. It’s always great to see small studios hit their stride and I look forward to seeing what they do in the future.
