A kingdom built from cards
9 Kings is a fast-paced roguelike kingdom builder where you grow a village into a citadel and throw it against rival kings. Each turn you place buildings, recruit units, and cast spells from a hand of cards, then watch the battles play out automatically. Your capital recruits units and grows their power, so positioning and long-term planning matter as much as the fight in front of you. Dozens of units are on offer, from sturdy knights and warlocks to glass cannon wizards, bombers, imps, and sentient mushrooms. Gold can hire mercenaries, dark magic raises the dead, and nature powers can be harnessed to bring enemies down. Every run is shaped by procedural generation, so the events, cards, and rival decks you face keep changing.
Playing with your group
The async multiplayer mode puts you against eight rival kings to see whose kingdom survives the longest, with ranks to climb and cosmetic customization unlocked through daily challenges and medals. Each king starts with a different deck of buildings, troops, and spells, and you can loot the decks of rival kings who attack your lands. That means you can make peace with kings whose units do not fit your style and declare war on the ones whose powers you want, then fold their cards into your own combos. Quest Mode travels the known world through mechanics-bending challenges, collecting crowns from the kings you face. Endless Mode picks a king and throws endless attacks from enemy kings and their strongest warriors at you for as long as you can hold out.
Before you start
The game is in Early Access, so expect things to shift as it develops. It is tagged as difficult, and the turn-based combat rewards planning over quick reflexes. Runs are built around stacking buffs and modifiers into broken combos, so be ready to experiment and to lose while you learn which cards feed each other. The singleplayer and async multiplayer paths share the same card-driven systems, so a build that works in one mode carries over to the others.