This Steam Next Fest has yielded a bumper crop of kingdom-style city builders. The King is Watching caught my eye initially, and now 9 Kings has emerged as the top-ranking city builder of the event. The thing is, 9 Kings is as much a roguelike deckbuilder as it is a kingdom builder, as developer Sad Socket explains.
The demo for 9 Kings has seemingly been around for a bit, but the updated one is featured in Next Fest and most of its "very positive" reviews were posted recently. The game is billed as a mix of grid-based building where you turn "your city into the most powerful of all kingdoms," and card-based strategy where you craft a deck of perks, actions, units, items, and upgrades. It's all rendered in lovely pixel art and seems like the kind of hard-to-put-down snack game that could quietly devour an evening.
