AthelingThe crown is only the beginning.
A strategy game about a family trying to keep a crown, a household, and a realm together, one decision at a time.
You play the head of a house at the moment history turns: Harold Godwinson in the year of three invasions, William after Hastings with a conquest to turn into a government, Henry Tudor on the brink of a new age.
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Early access. The game changes often, and what you read here describes it as it is now.
Three campaigns
- Free to play and replay
England, 1066
Edward is dead and leaves no son. Secure the Witan, manage your brothers, and ready a kingdom for two invasions in one autumn.
- One lifetime unlock
Norman England, 1066
You won at Hastings. Now hold the crown through nine years of risings, from the coronation at Westminster to the Revolt of the Earls.
- One lifetime unlock
The Bosworth Crown
Win a crown on the field, then spend fourteen years convincing England it was yours: Elizabeth of York, two boys who say they are princes, and the last Plantagenet in the Tower.
How it plays
Time moves in days. The council meets, riders carry your orders across the shires, and news reaches you late and bent by the road it travelled. Marriages, births, and deaths run underneath the kingdom like weather.
There are no timers, no adverts, and no subscription. The first campaign is free. One purchase opens everything that comes after it, including every campaign we add.
What it is, in plain words
A text-based dynasty strategy game for your phone, on iPhone and Android. One family, its marriages, its succession, its council and the obligations between named people, set in England in 1066 and later. The story is told in prose and decided one card at a time, with sessions of ten or twenty minutes.
It works offline, with no account and no server, and saves stay on your phone. The parchment interface is light on the battery, and the clock pauses when you leave.
The history holds until you change it. Harold, Tostig, Edwin, Morcar and Edgar Ætheling are built from what the sources tell us about them, uncertainty included, and the Chronicle records where your England parted from theirs.
The history underneath
A game set in history is nothing without a reliable basis in it. Play can go where the record did not, that is the point of playing, but the ground it starts from has to be solid: the people, dates and relationships as the sources give them, with the uncertainty left showing.
So the record the game runs on is published. Every person and event has a page with its dates, how sure they are, and the sources behind them, and a way to suggest a correction or a better source. Submissions are reviewed against sources, and when one stands up the record changes and the game changes with it.