Crownfront

Crownfront is a turn-based strategy game played on a board that sits on the floor of a room. Your castles, farms, forests and armies are pieces on that board, and you can see the whole kingdom from one end to the other, including the enemy's side.

It plays like a classic RTS in structure. You gather resources, put up buildings, expand across the map and eventually attack. The difference is that it all happens in turns. There are no build orders to execute against a clock and nobody wins because they clicked faster. You get as much time as you want to think about each move, and most of them will cost you something.

Food

The mechanic I built the whole game around is that every unit you own eats. Workers eat, soldiers eat, and they eat every turn. Farms take several turns to build and only start producing when they are finished, so if you recruit an army before the farms can support it, the army starts taking damage and units die. If you play it safe and build up the economy first, the enemy shows up with a bigger army while you are still farming. Most matches are decided by how well you manage that gap.

How a match goes

You start with a castle and some workers, with forest nearby. Wood is the first bottleneck because nearly everything early costs it, and almost straight away you have to choose whether the next building is a farm or a barracks.

From there you branch out. Stone deposits and iron ore deposits are on the map, and sending workers to mine them means pulling them off wood and food. A Blacksmith converts ore into ingots and unlocks Iron Working, which is what gets you Soldiers and Archers. Those are a tier above the Warriors and Scouts you start with and they make a real difference in a fight.

The University opens up three kingdom-wide upgrades. Engineering lets you build a Workshop and, through it, catapults. Military Theory means every military unit comes out already at Level 1. Civil Service makes workers build 50% faster and 10% cheaper. Around the same time you will be weighing up whether to upgrade your castle (each level adds storage, worker output and health) or build a second one, which costs iron.

Catapults deserve a mention because they work differently from anything else. They are buildings, not units, so they cannot move. An Engineer builds one, it takes a turn to prepare, and then it fires in one of two stances. Volley hits units in an area but does nothing to buildings. Bombardment does the opposite. Changing stance costs a turn, so you have to decide what it is for before you place it.

The match ends when one side's castle is destroyed. A full match takes around one to two hours, sometimes longer.

Combat details

Melee units that flank an enemy deal extra damage and take less retaliation. If they flank a ranged unit, the ranged unit cannot retaliate at all. Ranged units get their own bonus for hitting from behind. Every unit has separate Offense and Defense stats, and both are used to work out how much damage a defender deals back, so a bad attack can hurt you more than it hurts them.

Units gain levels over the course of a match. You can put up to 30 units in a group and move the group as one thing rather than moving each piece separately.