9 Kings
Worth it · Roguelike · 2025 · Early Access
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99.
- Length
- 5.2h
- Value
- $3.84/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 (2 GB) / AMD Radeon HD 6670 (2 GB), 502 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
A fast-paced roguelike kingdom builder. Grow your empire and fight massive battles against powerful rival kings. Break the game with thousands of insane builds to become the King of Kings.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $8.99, set in October 2025. It has been discounted 14 times in the 16 months tracked here, typically at 50 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 14 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 78 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 87 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Monster Train ($24.99, scores 88) beats it on value, while it beats Across the Obelisk ($19.99, scores 56).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 9 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2025 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 83 percent of the 1,544 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 5.2 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 23, 4.4 times as much.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 5.2 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
95% start to 26% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
6,920 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
9 Kings is a strategy game that is easy to play, but difficult to master. It might look like a cakewalk if you watch some videos showing you the gameplay on the lowest of levels, but once you start the more challenging ones, you'll be in for a surprise. The difficulty gets higher and higher, and even higher than that! The good thing is that (in my opinion) this makes it fun. You learn new strategies, combination of...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
9 Kings scores 77/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/2784470/9-kingsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.