Reigns
Worth it · RPG · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $2.99.
- Length
- 4.2h
- Value
- $0.71/hr
- Reviews
- 87% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Reigns is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Sit on the throne as a benevolent (or malevolent) medieval monarch of the modern age and swipe your royal controller either left or right to impose your will upon the kingdom.
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
It has never been cheaper than $0.98. That was August 2021. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 80 in the 10 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 2 percent of its genre. It is cheaper than 83 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Yes, Your Grace ($3.99, scores 78) beats it on value, while it beats Choice of Life: Middle Ages ($4.99, scores 69).
The press gave it 77; the people who bought it give it 87 percent. A 10-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 12 percent of players ever finish it. On a 4.2-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 687 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 7 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 2,368 reviews written there were positive, against 87 percent overall, and those are 32 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 4.2 hours; clearing it takes 16, which is 3.7 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 4.2 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
66% start to 12% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
10 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
I've always been a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books growing up, and this game successfully scratches that long lost itch in spades. If you enjoy text-based adventures, a simple but unique jagged, paper-esque artstyle, finding brutal, outrageous ways to meet your medieval demise, or simply wish to replace doomscrolling with side-scrolling, this is the game to stick with. And besides, it's less than $5!
Reigns is what happens when Tinder, medieval politics and an extremely unsafe workplace join forces. You play as a succession of kings who must respond to every royal problem by swiping a card left or right. Each decision affects the Church, the people, the army and the treasury. Allow any one of them to become too weak or too powerful and your reign ends-usually violently, embarrassingly or both. It sounds almost...
I was 20 cards away from all cards achievements but they decide to add more (which is good) and to reset all progress (now I am ALL cards away)
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.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Reigns scores 76/100 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/474750/reignsThe 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 Sep 17, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.