👑Crown & Coin

Controls

The stick and button 1 are enough to play. The rest add moves for the older kids.

How a round goes

Five days and five nights, about seven minutes in all, with a hard cap at eight and a half. The realm is a strip with the campfire in the middle and a front at each end. A monarch cannot swing a sword or lay a plank — a monarch rides to a place and pays, and somebody else does the work. Whatever you are standing near shows its price over your head, and that is what button 1 will buy.

Day: wanderers drift into camp. Pay one coin and a wanderer becomes your hand and follows you. Walk them to a hut and pay two to make them an archer (the fletcher), a builder (the workshop) or a farmer (the farm hut). Farmers earn coins into your purse. Builders fell trees inside the wall line for the realm's shared wood, and raise anything you have paid for once the wood is there. Archers shoot.

Building: pads along the ground. Pay at an empty one to fund it — a fence for two coins, a tower for five, a farm for four — and builders raise it when the wood allows. A standing wall can be paid up to timber and then stone; the upgrade is a job on the wall, which keeps stopping raiders at its old tier while it is worked on. Claim stones beyond each wall push the frontier out for six coins, opening new pads and new trees. At the campfire, pay to grow the camp: each level raises how many people the realm can hold.

Night: greedlings come for your gold. Nothing here kills anybody — a greedling that gets in takes coins off a monarch, robs a farm, or carries a person away. Shoot it before it reaches the edge and the loot drops for a monarch to ride over. Night one is a few greedlings; two is a bigger pack; three brings the breaker, who eats walls; four hits both ends at once; and on night five a portal opens on the weaker side and keeps pouring them out until it is destroyed. Only when there is nobody left to carry off do they start burning hearts off the campfire.

On night five a robbed monarch loses the crown. Ride back to where it fell, or wait for it to return to the fire — without it you cannot pay.

Scoring and winning

Points are paid for spending, not holding: 25 a coin spent, plus a bounty on every greedling, breaker and the portal, and 120 to everyone for each night held. A monarch who sits on forty coins finishes last however safe the realm is.

Win by seeing dawn after night five — closing the portal ends it early. Lose when the campfire's five hearts go out. Coins are private but the realm is shared: one woodpile, one campfire, one population cap. The card ranks by score, with ties going to whoever hired more people. Alone, your score goes to the leaderboard.

Tips

• The campfire's level is the population cap, and the cap is the ceiling on the whole economy: nobody new can be hired into a full camp. You can see it — the tents grow with the level.
• Wood is shared, coins are not, so the builder somebody else paid for is helping you. Farmers alone die on night five; a mixed realm outscores them three to one.
• Trees stand across the whole map, but builders may only fell them inside the wall line. That is the point of claiming ground.
• A fallen wall is not lost: it becomes a plan again at the tier it had, and builders put it back up on their own if there is wood.
• Button 1 alone is the whole verb set. Pads default to fences and farms, and a fresh hand follows you without the whistle.