Keep your people fed and happy while you build in Kingdoms and Castles, a medieval city-builder made by Lion Shield, first released on PC in 2017 and later on Xbox and PlayStation. In each game, you start with a small hamlet and grow it into a busy town with a castle. The game rewards careful planning, and the place to begin is housing, since homes let your population grow. Those people become the workers who run your farms, woodcutters, and stone quarries.
Those workers need food, so you build farms and granaries to store it. Fires can break out, plagues can spread, and raiders such as Vikings, dragons, and ogres attack from time to time. Walls, towers, and soldiers are how you hold them off. Your people also need to stay content, and churches and taverns help keep their spirits up.
Taxes turn your people's work into gold, which pays for your castle and the town's bigger buildings. The castle itself is made from blocks you can place almost anywhere, and its walls and towers take shape from how you stack and arrange them. You can also add neighboring kingdoms run by the computer, to trade with, ally with, or go to war against. The aim is a city with a castle that stays fed, happy, and safe, and your success depends on how well you plan.
- Developer
- Lion Shield, LLC
- Publisher
- Lion Shield, LLC
- Release
- Windows, macOS, and Linux: 2017-07-20 · Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S: 2023-12-01 · PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5: 2024-03-21
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Game data
Buildings
Buildings are how you shape a town in Kingdoms and Castles. Houses bring in people, farms and granaries feed them, and taverns, churches, walls and docks keep people content and protected. Castle, military, maritime and dragon buildings widen what your kingdom can do, and research and tax money decide when you can build them.
Collectibles
Achievements
Kingdoms and Castles has achievements that track your progress from your first Keep through to the Kingdom of the Gods. Most of them measure your population as it climbs through the village, town and kingdom titles, while others cover beating a dragon or an ogre and building a very tall Tower of Babel. Each one unlocks on its own once you reach it, and the top kingdom titles are the rarest.
Kingdoms and Castles gameplay tips
- Start near fertile land. Farms need good soil, and your people need food before anything else.
- Fill your granaries before each winter. Winter comes back every year and destroys crops, so the food you have stored is what keeps people from starving.
- Build archer towers tall, and keep one near your granary. Archer towers reach farther the higher they go, and dragons can set your granary on fire.
- Set taxes just high enough to pay for your castle. Pushing taxes too high makes residents miserable, so build churches and taverns before you raise them.
- Use foresters to replant trees instead of clearing whole forests. Forests grow through a tree growth simulation, so a managed forest keeps supplying lumber.
- Try Creative mode before a real game. It lets you change the map and tweak the game's systems, so you can test a layout without risking a town you have built.