Although it’s still in early access, 9 Kings is already an incredibly addicting roguelike with a very simple yet satisfying gameplay loop. It’s a kingdom deck builder where you pick and play cards drawn from varying types of monarchs, and your only goal is to survive the endless onslaught of your warmongering rivals.
It’s a perfect game to play in short bursts as each run lasts just around 20-30 minutes, unless you’re on higher difficulties or can somehow push far into its optional endless mode with the easier settings. Let’s talk about it!
Deceptively Deep Mechanics
In 9 Kings, you have to choose one of the aforementioned rulers, and they each have their own unique decks and “palace” of sorts. These decks include a handful of units and towers that you can deploy, and they typically all follow a unique theme.
For example, the King of Greed’s cards are mostly centered around generating and maintaining a lot of gold. The King of Nothing, on the other hand, stays true to his title by having generic units and support buildings.
When you start a run, a trio of kings is selected as your initial set of enemies. Throughout your playthrough, you can draw from their decks after each battle, and you occasionally get an opportunity to add or remove a king from the pool.
Crazy Synergies!
9 Kings has a surprising amount of depth, but that’s not to say that it’s complicated. In fact, it’s anything but that. What I mean is that, despite the limited card choices per king, there are many possible synergies that you can play around with when you start mixing and matching their offerings.
The small decks actually work in the game’s favor, as it makes it extremely easy to cook up a build the moment you see the starting set of kings. Once you know what you’ll be going for, it’s just a matter of carefully choosing where to deploy your cards and whether or not RNGesus cooperates.
Playing King of Greed and you rolled Stone and Nothing? Smells like a tower-based build to me. Blood and Nature together? I’m filling up the field with an absurd number of imps and demons!
As with any game of this nature, it’ll still get pretty old after multiple hours worth of repeat runs. You’d have gotten your money’s worth by then, though, and there’s still a bit of new stuff coming in future updates.
Testing Its Limits
In the normal game mode, your run ends after a certain number of waves. However, you can continue playing through what’s essentially an “endless” mode where the difficulty will keep ramping up over time.
It’s a fun way to test whatever build you’ve been working on, and you can really push the game’s limits to absurd lengths. In its current state though, it does ramp up too hard to the point where you’ll eventually lose no matter what you do.
This seems to be a common complaint that I’ve seen as well, since the game is currently intended to be played just until you officially “win”. They’ll need to tune this a bit just so enemies don’t suddenly become unkillable beasts after a certain wave.
Seriously, the game eventually flips the “this is now unwinnable” switch, at least in the current version. Just look at this post-game screen from a run I attempted while writing this:
If towers whose stats all have letters in them can’t even shred through regular soldiers in normal difficulty, there’s something hilariously wrong with the scaling. Luckily, this is just an optional challenge, and the game does warn you that it’ll get pretty silly and broken from that point on.
Wrapping Things Up…
Despite being in early access, 9 Kings is already a blast to play through, and it has everything you need in a casual roguelike experience: Fast-paced gameplay, easy mechanics with potentially complex builds, and an already diverse set of tools to mess around with.
As of writing this, they’re working on releasing a roadmap for future updates, and it’s still missing two more rulers, so there’s plenty to look forward to! There’s also the upcoming challenge and ranked modes, so we can expect a leaderboard to pop up further down the line.
Even in its current state, I can highly recommend adding it to your library now. Like I mentioned at the start, it’s a wonderful choice for when you have limited time to play but are craving for some really satisfying “big number go brrrr” gameplay. On the flip side, you can push through the King difficulty levels until you beat the current hardest setting!
