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Kingdoms and Castles
Kingdoms and Castles suits thoughtful town planning that is repeatedly tested by raids and dragon attacks. In single-player, develop a settlement, manage resources and build castles from flexibly placed walls and towers. The current price is $9.99 at 
Steam; whether to buy comes down to how much this blend of city building and defense appeals to you. Steam lists Kingdoms and Castles at $9.99, while Steam offers it for $9.99.
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $8.992023-08Current Low Across Stores~ $9.99Steamvs. Historical Low+11%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Kingdoms and Castles
In Kingdoms and Castles, grow a small hamlet into a sprawling settlement through city planning, farming and resource management. Keep residents fed and content, manage forests and fields, and decide how much to tax your people. Viking raiders may kidnap villagers and steal supplies, while dragons threaten crops and buildings. Arrange walls and towers to defend your growing kingdom. A dynamic world and seasonal cycle accompany the settlement’s growth. The Steam PC version has a 93% positive player rating from 30,375 reviews.
Credits
Developer
Lion Shield, LLC
Publisher
Lion Shield, LLC
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$8.992023-08-18 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | — | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | — | — |
| English | Yes | — | — |
Show 15 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Yes | — | — |
| French | Yes | — | — |
| Dutch | Yes | — | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | — | — |
| Italian | Yes | — | — |
| Japanese | Yes | — | — |
| Korean | Yes | — | — |
| Norwegian | Yes | — | — |
| Polish | Yes | — | — |
| Romanian | Yes | — | — |
| Russian | Yes | — | — |
| Ukrainian | Yes | — | — |
| Swedish | Yes | — | — |
| Turkish | Yes | — | — |
| Spanish-Latin America | Yes | — | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Interface and controller
The Steam PC version has full controller support. Its interface includes English and a range of other languages.
Building and defense
Plan a settlement, manage resources and place castle walls and towers to defend against Viking raids and dragons.
03Frequently asked questions
Can I play solo?
Yes. The Steam PC version includes single-player play.
Are there seasons?
Yes. The world features seasons, including a summer-to-winter cycle.
Can I deal with neighboring kingdoms?
Yes. The description includes agreements, alliances and wars with AI-controlled neighboring kingdoms.
6.8
Overall Score
Graphics6
Audio6.5
Gameplay8
Story5
Content7.5
“City-building defense hybrid sustained by deep sandbox editors and a vibrant mod ecosystem, though console ports suffer from optimization and late-game repetition.”
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Should You Buy Kingdoms and Castles? I have made a short video to help you decide that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ttpFpTxA4E Pros: - The price is right - Developers are very active in updating and transparent with their community - There are already FREE future DLC's planned - 3 different game modes: Easy, Normal, and Hard - I have put in 20+ hours of fun(played it before it was on Steam) and still want to play it lots more - The music is quite good and relaxing Either: - The art style is very simplistic and(I think) cute Cons: - I have still encountered a few new bugs after every game update but nothing has been game breaking - The advisors in the game are a bit underwhelming and not useful after the first 5 minutes or so - in fact the notification "!" can be a bit annoying when there's nothing important to learn - On normal mode, the viking attacks can sometimes be frustratingly close together and not allowing you time to recover from the previous attack, but there is always peaceful mode if it becomes too much for you Overall I have had a lot of fun with this game(around 20 hours played including time outside of Steam) and the price is so low that, if you enjoy simulation and city building games, you will surely get your money's worth of fun out of it. Hope this helps! Edit: Adding Q/A here from comments: Q: Is it hard to keep a working economy or does the city run itself like in many other builders once you have the basics down? A: It runs itself in the sense that you don't have to click on each civilian and tell them what to do - jobs are taken care of automatically once you build the thing that needs workers. However, sometimes you may have the need to close or open the building if you already have enough of that material or you want your people to focus on something else instead. So, in a sense it runs itself but you still have to balance how many foresters you want, how many quarries, blacksmiths, farmers, etc. Q: Are there goals in the game or is it just build a big a city as possible? A: It is an open sandbox game so the goals are what you make for yourself. If you need more structure than that then you'll probably get bored fast. But for me, I like to make goals such as - can I actually be successful enough to build my entire city within castle walls? Can I get my defenses up high enough that I'll be able to have minimal damages when invaded? Can I build an army big enough that I can send my general in and conquer their armies and constantly have bonus happiness from winning battles? Can I expand my kingdom enough to encompass the entire land that is provided to me? Can I have a really happy kingdom while taxing them to the max? So far I have not achieved any of those completely so I am still working towards them. Q: Are there multiple ways to build a city or will every game take the same course? A: You can build your city however you want - but there will always be things you need such as wood, stone, and food. You can make the layout however you want as well, and if you don't feel like building churches you don't have to build churches, it will make your citizens unhappy but you can choose to try and make up that deficit with something else. Q: How many options are there for aesthetics individualiziation of your city? A: It is a visually simplistic game which I touched on that may be either a pro or con for people depending on personal taste. Every building has one design.Show moreShow less
8.9 hours at review581 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Pros ==== + The game overall is fun to play. + It does have a lot of replay value with its random map seeds. Cons ==== - The number of enemies are minimal: * Dragon: Easy to defeat if you have a few ballista towers. * Vikings: . General: Nothing special, he just leads the army. . Soldiers: Nothing special, they just follow the general. . Ships: They carry Vikings and have catapults which can attack your walls. . Ogres: They have the ability to destroy walls. (The most fun to fight) - The AI isn't very smart. For example, the Viking will travel by ship to get to your kingdom, get out of the ship, walk on the land for a bit, then jump into the water and swim alongside your stone wall (which they can't attack)...rather than simply using the ship to attack the stone wall. - Aside from the ship catapults (which are used mostly at point-blank with your walls) the enemy doesn't have any ranged attack, making battles very easy to handle if you have archer and ballista towers. - The game doesn't feel finished. For example you can build a Great Hall but it doesn't do anything other than upgrade the size of your keep. Having an "upgraded" keep doesn't appear to do anything either. - There is no management of citizens or their jobs. You can turn off buildings to force them to find something else to do but there's no way to set specific jobs as higher priority. There's no way to tell a building to maintain a certain stock of items. Instead they will continually produce until you either turn them off or the resources run dry. There's also no way to quickly see the number of buildings you have of a specific type. - Wall height can be co-dependent when doing height checks. That means you can have two ridiculously high walls standing next to each other with no other means of support because each wall piece will satisfy the others height check. You simply build one wall segment up until it can't be built any higher, then build the one next to it, and keep going back and forth until you've built a monolithic 2 piece tower with ballistae on top that can hit every single thing on the entire map. - The game will occasionally crash to desktop with some random pop-up errors from the game engine. - There are some odd interactions with the environment. For example your people can't walk through walls, but if there is a fire they will walk right through a wall to get water from the ocean to put a fire out. Occasionally there will also be things that they can't reach. By deleting and rebuilding the object in its original place they can somehow now reach it. Recommendation ============= I would recommend holding off and waiting a year or so for more to be added to this game. After looking at the update progress of this game, it is clear that it isn't complete yet. Update v106 added wooden walls, stone roads, a statue, and three aqueduct buildings for the irrigation system. While the game is fun to play, it feels incomplete like an early access game.Show moreShow less
18.6 hours at review1,156 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
seed's i need for later xd: ILN1188045915 ILS1590366209 old review from 2018-20: ===[ ❤ Audience: ]=== ☐ Kids ☑ Everyone ☐ Casual players ☐ Pro players ===[ ☼ Graphics: ]=== ☐ Potato ☐ Really bad ☐ Bad ☐ OK ☑ Good ☐ Beautiful ☐ Masterpiece ===[ $ Price/quality: ]=== ☐ Full price ☑ Wait for sale ☐ Average ☐ Refund it if you can ☐ Don't do it ===[ ☣ Requirments: ]=== ☐ 90' PC ☑ Minimum ☐ Medium ☐ Fast ☐ High end ☐ NASA computer ===[ ☼ Difficulty: ]=== ☐ You just need 2 arms ☐ Ez ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Hard (first few hours) ☐ Reksio ===[ ۞ Game time/length ]=== ☐ Really short ( 0 - 2 hours) ☐ Short ( 2 - 8 hours) ☐ Few hours ( 8 - 12 hours) ☐ Long ( 12+ hours) ☑ Endless ===[ ♬ Story] === ☐ It doesn't have ☑ Still better than Twilight ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Fantastic ===[ § Bugs ]=== ☐ Game itself is one big BUG ☐ Bugs destroying the game ☐ Lot of bugs ☑ Few Bugs ☐ You can use them for speedrun ☐ Nothing ===[ ✦ Others: ]=== Multiplayer: No Singleplayer: Yes Edit: I know, not really a review perhaps but more or less a guideline for how easy it is. Edit2: Wish this game had workshop support so i could drag stonewalls selection instead.Show moreShow less
26.5 hours at review498 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
The dragon's lifeless body fell right onto the exact spot where I laid the foundation of my town. As I watched the dragon's body clip through the Keep, a sense of relief washed over me. Not relief for my townsfolk, whom I had just saved from a fiery demise. No, not for them, but for me. With the slaying of that dragon notched on my archers' scoreboards, I had done everything there was to do in Kingdoms and Castles....and I had just hit the six hour mark. Technically, I hadn't done everything...there were some Steam achievements leftover for hitting certain population milestones, which would take a lot more downtime than I was willing to pump into Kingdoms and Castles. So, more accurately, I had done everything there was that was worth doing, in the game. Kingdoms and Castles started out as straightforward, town-building, strategy game. With around two-dozen buildings to construct, everything had a clear purpose and their functions alongside the other buildings made sense. There were no obscure rules to learn, or elaborate game mechanics to keep track of. Wood, stone, food, and population were the only major things that needed monitoring; adequate water coverage (either from coastlines or wells), citizen happiness level (boosted by the presence of churches or taverns), and smart guard tower placement (to defend against invaders) were the only other facets of the game that necessitated the most attention. There are a handful of other resource systems that need monitoring, but those that I mentioned represent the core of the game. As far as strategy city-building games go, they don't come much simpler and easy-to-play than Kingdoms and Castles. The game's graphic style mirrors that simplicity. Featuring peg-like peasants, the game's visual appeal comes from watching the dozens or hundreds of peasants scurrying around doing their duties. Once open housing is available, peasants will randomly "move in" to your town and they will automatically pick up on any available task that needs doing. It was fun to zoom out and watch the town in action. Watching the peasants all hopping around doing their own jobs reminded me a lot of watching tiny fish in a fish tank. For awhile anyway, it was quite a relaxing time. Unfortunately, as pleasant as it was to watch...I could only watch so much before I found myself rapping my fingers on my keyboard, awaiting progressing. Once I had read all of the little tooltips for every building there was to build, and had a basic understanding of what a good city layout in Kingdoms and Castles should look like, I had very little else to do as I waited for more citizens to move in, or for more resources to be collected. Occasionally a viking raid would arrive, and while they increase in strength over time, they're easy enough to repel that a few archer towers will do you just fine for the first hour of gameplay. They show up, slowly make their way into your town, steal resources and peasants, and make their way back to their boat. If you kill all the vikings you get to keep your resources, if not, you lose all they managed to snag on their way out. Dragons would also show up, but their presence was a complete joke. The dragons would fly in at random times and mostly just float above my city. Perhaps the dragons in these lands had some sort of amnesia, because they acted more like butterflies than dragons. Only occasionally did they every drop a fire-blast or two down onto my town. Sometimes they never even flew near my town to begin with. But I finally encountered a dragon that flew right through the heart of my city. After being pelted by arrows for a good half-minute, it was over. The dragon's body vanished as it fell into my Keep, I breathed a partially-annoyed sigh of relief, and my peasants scurried on, unaware that their lives were about to end forever. Kingdoms and Castles wasn't a bad game in that it was broken, and it was even fun for a short time, but after I killed that dragon and I unlocked the achievement, I resigned as Lord of [Tom Already Forgot What He Named His Town] forever. I just can't recommend Kingdoms and Castles; the game was not fun enough for long enough, and gave me absolutely no reason to play it all over again. [[Not recommended]] There just wasn't enough variety of things to do to keep my attention past an hour or two. Feels very much like a stable, early-access release, rather than a full retail game. I will monitor Kingdoms and Castles for major developments and update this review as necessary. (This full review is taken from my website: Epic BrewShow moreShow less
8 hours at review349 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I'm so glad there is a non combat mode. It's a great game to chill out to. The music is relaxing and not at all annoying like some game music is. Only drawback for me so far is the UI Interface size. It's way to small for my old eyes, and there seems to be no way yet to make the letters larger. I totally recommend this game.Show moreShow less
20.9 hours at review330 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
It's a nice game for a few hours but once u built everything and got a stable city there is nothing else to do. Game needs alot more content to really last longer.Show moreShow less
10.7 hours at review263 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
There are a lot of games like this, most notably Banished, Life is Feudal: Forest Village, the Settlers series, the Tropico series, Hearthlands, etc., etc., although each of them tries to add on its own twist (first-person view in Forest Village, no food requirements in Settlers, politics in Tropico, "tech-trees" in Hearthlands, etc.). The formula boils down to the same thing each time: balancing the economy. An abundance of X is a waste of your efforts, especially when there is a shortage of Y that you need to address. This is what Kingdoms and Castles does amazingly. The neat twist it puts on this genre: your town must now do tower defense, against a random opponent who won't wipe out your city completely, every 10 years in-game time or so. What can go wrong in these types of games? If you overproduce just one commodity sufficiently, it will flood the distribution channels and cause traffic jams (Hearthlands) -- restart game. If you run out of medicine or clothing or some required item that you started out with a stockpile, then everyone in the village dies (Banished) -- restart game. If you harvest all of the iron on the starting map and use it on toasters instead of swords (Settlers) -- restart game. If you build a city that's so big that citizens can't do adequate path-finding in time (Tropico) -- restart game. In Kingdoms and Castles: (1) producers auto self-regulate to prevent over-production, (2) lack of food is the only thing that can cause mass starvations, and it's temporary, (3) all mines may produce limitless quantities, (4) path-finding is notoriously accurate and almost error-proof. For $10, this is a GOOD BUY. I hope they add more content, though, without messing up the economy. From what I see with patch updates so far, I'm excited! P.S. June 3, 2018 Update: Game still amazingly awesome with great new features after walking away 3 months ago. Still a GOOD BUY!Show moreShow less
35.6 hours at review278 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I waited a year to review this game because well I kinda forgot about it because it took over a year for the newest update to come out. There is alot of potential for this game but it seems like it just can't get it right. The updates for this game are very very slow, it took a year for the AI kingdom update to come out which was....kinda lackluster in my opinion. You can basically ignore the new AI when they try to talk to you and they don't really do anything about it. It's very easy to become unkillable and the newest difficulty did not effect that. The hardest part of the "survival mode" 250 days is not falling asleep waiting for the days to pass for it to be over. For the most part the dialogue between all the new AI are the same between all of them. It's actually mind boggling that people think this adds a ton to the game. There is still alot of problems with how things work in the game. Peasants will demand you build lets say the tavern or their morale will drop, well you can just build it and close it and they will be happy and morale will go back up. This applies to multiple buildings in the game and has been like that since over a year ago. Unit AI is really bad especially with the new units that can't attack things on their own without you clicking every single attack order. Buildings require you to place them next to a road, well you can just remove the road after you built it and it'll function normally which makes no sense in the first place why you even need to place a road to begin with. Waiting for new villagers is extremely slow without spamming festivals nonstop. It was fun for about 5-6 hours but the gameplay loop is the same between every game. The viking and dragon attacks are pretty boring after the first few when you realize they don't really do a whole lot to you in the early game and later on after a few defenses are built they stand no chance at all. The aesthetics part is good but the overall gameplay is not so good. At least the price reflects what you are getting despite it still feeling like a early access. Maybe the next update in a year from now will change my opinion.Show moreShow less
32.4 hours at review234 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I edited this review so you don't know how do I have so many awards and likes on it.Show moreShow less
12.4 hours at review231 people found this helpful
Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
I really liked this game initially, until I realize how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it actually was. Until these things are seen to, I sadly can't recommend this game: - Fire in this game is a stupid random mechanic. That a coal mine caches on fire I can see, but that my lord Levi statue catches fire randomly (that's a stone statue by the way) is totally unpredictable and a huge waste of resources if your villagers are too far away or too dumb to actually throw water at it (which they are 90% of the time). Make fire logical, not random, please... - Foresters have a stupid mechanic where you need a tree nearby to grow trees. Meaning that, if your forester, by some dumb chance, cut the last tree before putting down a new one, well, tough luck, your forester is useless. Haven't these people heard of seeds? - Knowing how efficient you are in this game is basically guess work, and in a management game, this is unacceptable. I had 5 foresters house (10 villagers) actually doing nothing because they were dumb enough to cut the last tree around them. Also, there doesn't seem to be any priority for placing villagers into buildings, meaning they pretty much go wherever they want, so you need to close building that you actually need just to shuffle your people around. - Speaking of efficiency. Who the hell designed those storehouses? They are the most useless mechanic in the game, and they are MANDATORY. When I saw storehouses and that they had people tending them, I thought these would carry cargo around depending on the needs of the populace, so putting charcoal near bakers, blacksmiths and houses that use them. But no, that's not how this game works. Storehouses are basically proximity storage, meaning they are made for workers to drop their stuff. Not dropping their stuff faster, because villager won't walk more than 10 feets to drop materials. Just dropping them. I had a row of 5 forester around a road with a large storage, and the two at the edges could not figure out the storage and stopped production, when they were litterally in the same screen. - Same problem with food, I thought I would make a giant city town and have farmland on the outside where it's fertile. You know? Like every single medieval city in the bloody world ever? Guess what? You can't do that! If you do that, all the citizens inside your wall will starve! Because it'll take more than 5 seconds for these peasants to get to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grainery (that has to be close to your farms, otherwise you lose your harvests in the winter, because villagers can't store ♥♥♥♥ fast enough) and by the time they travel from the house, to the grainery, back to the house, they actually have to go back to the granery, because they already don't have enough food to live! And guess what? Citizens that go back and forth like this, well, they don't do usefull stuff, like, you know, FARMING. Which means your harvest gets slower and slower, until you reach the 0 food and everyone is unhappy. Oh yeah, speaking of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanics! - Unhappiness. The mechanic itself isn't a bad idea. It's just bad in its execution, like everything else in the game. Every house in the game has this happiness meter that goes up and down depending on certain things, like, if you have access to a well or charcoal. The problem is that the thing not only doesn't make sense, it's so fickle it can blow off your entire city in an heartbeat. Let's say your house have an happiness level of 60 because of the nice scenery and the well nearby. You build a coal mine quite far (but not too far because of the damn storage problem) so they have a nice supply of coal which gives +8 happiness. But when they don't have enough coal in the house (because the peasant is too stupid to carry it fast enough), you don't go to +0 happiness. No, you go to -8. And if you wait too long, you can go down up to -20 (that I've seen). So basically, if my coal production stops because I'm out of wood because of my retarded forester, well, I just lost 16 happiness, and it will go down to -28 happiness over time to all the houses that coal production worked for. Now, note that this is on a base of 100, and that you won't reach 100 easily, meaning you'll hover around 80, 70 if you actually tax your people to get decent money. Suddenly, you go down to 50 or even 40. Nobody will then join your town, meaning you can't build back the industry to satisfy your town, because nobody is there to fill the holes. So your happiness will just keep spiraling down. And that's when you're not hit with my next point. - Random. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Events. Again, good idea, ♥♥♥♥ execution. I've seen 3 main events in the game: a random plague, a random dragon attack and a random viking invasion. The first one is relatively harmless after a few years, as an hospital would more likely be enough to take care of a rather big time. That would be if your townspeople were intelligent people. Remember when I said kind of go where they want to work? That includes the bloody hospital! So if suddenly, all your doctor left because you couldn't pay them for one tick, well, tough luck! You'll have to wait until the next patch of peasants come into town! Oh wait... They won't be coming! Because you get a bloody -30, -40 happiness because of the plague if it kills people, and another -15 happiness just because...well, there was a plague. So you're sitting at 10 happiness, people are leaving because they are unhappy. Good luck finding doctors for the next one. The next two I'll cover together on my next point, because they have the same problem and brings another one. - The thing I wished for this game was to build a giant fortress town, have big walls and soldiers and stuff. You can get big walls and soldiers. And you'll need them. A lot. The dragon encounter is a random dude that flies over your fortifications and burns your stuff. What it'll burn is...guess what? RANDOM. Meaning it could set fire to the random house that nobody cares about, or your ENTIRE BLOODY FARM LAND. And with the retarded AI and it's water management...you get the picture. What's the point of building walls? You can't even block that thing. Well, it must be for the viking invasion right? Hahaha... haha. ha... ♥♥♥♥ me... - The viking invasion is the worse design of this game. As someone that didn't play much of the game, I have no idea what's the most optimal root, but I manage to struggle along, with all the random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I find this to be a feat. But then, you get this event. And then you cry. You see, vikings come in boats. Over water. The map is around 70% water. So you know those walls I told you about? Make sure you build them around the water too! Because that's how coastal towns work, right! These ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ will jump you from a somewhat random direction. Most often then not, the one where you DON'T HAVE WALLS. And even if you do have walls, if you only have a SINGLE hole in them, they will come in. Meaning you NEED to build walls a soon as you are able. You see, I'm a wimp, I like to play my game on easy. So I picked easy mode, because I wanted to fight stuff, and managing your army is about 70% of this game so if you pick the passive mode, you're going to get bored real ♥♥♥♥♥♥' fast. On easy, after walling my entire city and created towers all around my coastal town, and even putting archer towers inside my town, the bloody viking came in from the worse spot where all my houses were stacked. Yeeeeah, instant restart. No matter how many towers you have, they'll burn everything by the time you kill them. And because villagers are smart, they go and douse the flames! And get butchered by the ♥♥♥♥♥♥' vikings. Yeeeaah. ♥♥♥♥ vikings. Oh! But you know, don't settle near water! That gotta work right? Yes, you'll also be missing on 70% of the map, so be prepared to roll a good map at the start where the fertile ground, rocks and iron aren't all near water. Good luck with that, I have better things to do with my time.Show moreShow less
8.6 hours at review176 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.