Kingdoms and Castles
Worth it · Strategy · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $9.99.
- Length
- 9.7h
- Value
- $1.03/hr
- Reviews
- 94% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 1 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Kingdoms and Castles is a city-building simulation game about growing a kingdom from a tiny hamlet to a sprawling city and imposing castle. Make trade agreements, alliance, and war with neighboring AI controlled kingdoms. Each villager and resource is individually simulated.
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 $6.99, set in November 2018. It has been discounted 56 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 33 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today's $9.99 at 50 percent off still sits 43 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
At full price it scores 72. The current cut is what makes it a 85.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 91 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Stronghold Crusader HD (2012) ($9.99, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Foundation ($34.99, scores 58).
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 15 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2022 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 62 percent of the 1,134 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
At 9.7 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
97% start to 4% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
317 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
Peak chill game. Relaxing music and great game to calm down and build a peaceful village into a decent kingdom. Easy game to come back to time and time again after many years
I have owned this game for years and play it on and off a lot. It's genuinely a fun game and the graphics are cute. 11/10
If you look through the reviews, you will see that even of those who bothered to write a review, most have not played more than 100 hours. This is not a game with great replayability. It feels just about the same every time, and the only truly difficult mode involves non-renewable resources that are just tedious and not a fun difficulty setting. It is fun to play through a few times. But most people probably...
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
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Kingdoms and Castles scores 84/100 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/569480/kingdoms-and-castlesThe 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 14, 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.