You begin with a very simple tutorial, barely giving you instruction on how to play. You are a King on horseback. You move to the right, pick up some coins, then can hire some civilians, buy bows or hammers. Bows and Hammers are placed in the stock and any civilians pick them up to become Archers and Builders respectively.
At night monsters may attack, so you need archers to fend them off. Your King cannot attack. During the day, archers will hunt rabbits. It’s very important to have a high quantity of archers.
You can recruit more citizens by finding camps. They will walk back to your town but they often walk slow and will get attacked by the monsters. So you really can only recruit early in the morning to alleviate this.
You can build walls and towers in designated sections.
Once you upgrade your town centre, you can then create scythes for farmers. Farmers produce more coins. Further upgrade gives you access to catapults and knights.
Walking past your citizens will give you coins if they have some (usually collected after killing rabbits), or from farmers. A chest spawns next to your castle each day.
You can travel left and right, and moving from one side to the other can take a long time. Your horse gets tired so you sometimes have to walk until he recovers. You can tell if your horse is tired by his breathing.
When the King gets attacked, he drops coins. If you have no coins, you drop your crown. If the enemy grabs the crown; then it is game over. When your citizens get attacked, they drop their equipment and become normal citizens which you have to re-recruit.
The UI is minimal. You have a bag of coins and aren’t told how many coins you have, but there’s a visual representation. When it comes to buying something, you have to guess if you can afford it and hold down to drop coins into the slots. If you don't have enough, the coins will drop to the ground and you have to pick them up again. When your bag of coins is full, any coins you pick up will be dropped and you will often lose them.
Now here is the thing, most of the mechanics have negatives and you only really learn them by playing the game and failing. On my first play, I didn’t have enough archers and got overrun after an hour. The other mistake I made was upgrading my town centre; this significantly reduces the amount of coins you earn from the chest per day.
The second play, I recruited loads of archers, but I built loads of towers, which seemed good at the time. However, as the game progressed this made me weaker.
Building a tower means an archer is permanently assigned. You can upgrade multiple times which increases the capacity and therefore you lose more archers. Once the archer is assigned, he cannot be reassigned. So not only do they stop hunting, if you build walls further away from them, then they provide no value at all unless the monsters destroy your outer wall. At night, your army will always gather next to your outermost wall.
It seems a great idea to expand by paying 1 coin to destroy trees. This seems to spawn more rabbits and allow you to build walls nearer to the enemy portals. However, if you expand to the camps where you recruit new citizens, the camp will be removed so this actually restricts your growth.
Your overall aim is to destroy the 4 portals. When you destroy a portal, an army spawns and will do massive retaliatory damage. On my second play, I destroyed a portal, but most of my army got wiped out by the counter attack. I went over to the other side to launch an attack on the second portal, but I found that my army, towers and walls were also destroyed.
On my third play, I managed to wipe out 2 portals on the left hand side, but the counter attack wiped my army and the farmers which was my main source of income. It took a few days to recover, by accumulating coins and going back to re-recruit the civilians. The thing is, even though the attacks had ceased from the left, a massive attack came from the right and wiped me out.
There’s a bit of randomness in the map although the changes mostly don’t make much difference. I say mostly, because on the third playthrough, I never found the shrines which can temporarily boost your attack which probably would have been really helpful on that play. I don’t recall seeing the black horse on the first two plays which is an upgraded horse.
The mechanics of venturing left/right and accumulating coins to strengthen your base are similar to a zombie themed game I played called Deadly 30. I felt that Deadly 30 was more obvious in its mechanics and was more engaging; because you are involved in attacking enemies during the day as you scavenge, then retreat to your base to defend at night. Kingdom has the basic mechanics down but it seems like all the mechanics are against you until you learn the ultimate strategy, but you probably have to sink about 6 hours to learn it.