I wanted to dislike 9 Kings, I really did. The idea didn’t seem all that appealing, the mechanics looked limited, and the graphics were boring, but the gameplay loop was so addicting that I just had to write a small review about it. I know that when I say I’m going to write a brief review, I usually end up going on pages, but this time it’s for real, guys!
- Genre: Strategy Roguelike
- Developer: Sad Socket
- Publisher: Hooded Horse, INSTINCT3
- Release Date: 23th May, 2025
- Price: $9.74/ 9,74€/ £8.44
- Buy at: Steam
- Reviewed On: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 2080
The best way to describe 9 Kings is a fast-paced, fantasy kingdom builder, roguelike, and autobattler with deckbuilding elements. Quite a mix-up, uh? Well, if it sounds stupid but it works, maybe it isn’t all that stupid after all. You pick one of seven available kings (the two others are still to come during the game’s early access phase) and at your disposal is a total of 9 tiles. Every turn you can play a card, and these can be units, buildings, buffs, or special and rare flavor cards with unique attributes, like a backline goat that if killed grants you gold.
After playing your card for the turn you’ll be attacked by one of 4 kings and their armies. If you manage to survive their onslaught, the game keeps going, and you can play another turn. Let the enemy reach your castle/palace/altar and you lose a round. Lose 3 rounds and the game’s over and you have to begin another round. Win 30 or so rounds and the game’s over, you have won. Sounds simple enough, right?
That’s because it is, you see, the magic of 9 Kings is in the way you can mix and mash every available card together to create the most absurd combos possible. Each king has their own deck of 9 cards (you cannot change these), and each king has their own special gameplay style. The King of Nothing, for example, is the classic medieval archetype with a castle, soldiers, archers, and defensive towers, but the King of Blood focuses on sacrificing their own troops to buff up his towers and demons, while the King of Greed is all making the maximum amount of money possible to hire more mercenaries and increase his Gatling towers effectiveness. While each king might only have 9 cards, each turn you win you’ll be able to choose one card of the specific king you just defeated, so you can see how wild things can get when you mix up snipers with imps, shamans, and elves.
As for the game’s 9 tiles, this is where most of the magic happens. Each unit or building card must be placed in one of these 9 tiles, so your space is rather limited. At least, at the beginning. Since buildings can buff up units, players need to define a strategy in order to maximize their limited means. Maybe you want a unit in the center and every building to be buffing it. Maybe you want a tower on each side with buildings around them giving them buff to their firing rates, or giving them poison, or static shocks, or what have you. As the game progresses you’ll have access to a couple more tiles, so you can end up with extremely fun combos. My favorite one is putting every single building I can get to increase the firing rate of my Gattling towers and just sit back and watch as they mow down hundreds of units with scary efficiency, and they kill the last-round boss in less than half a second.
As you play with each King you’ll gain experience, which in turn allows you to unlock some much-needed perks for high difficulties, such as an increased number of tiles, the amount of times you can level up each tile, the amount of cards on your hand a given time, and a lot of fun stuff you should discover by yourself. The point of the game is for you to use these dumb combos to break and bend it to your will, and that’s not me saying, but the developers on their own Steam page.
Throughout each game, you’ll have access to a merchant, perks, and even special boons which can dramatically change the way you strategize that specific run. Each run lasts for around 10 to 15 minutes if you go all the way to the end, and each one plays very differently from the others, so you can see how the loop of “let’s try this again” naturally arises, and as soon as you come to your senses it’s already 2am and you should be in bed.
If I had to point out any criticism is that I would like to have more cards available for each king and that there was some kind of free-play mode where one could build a massive Kingdom and see what kind of wild creations could come of it. I also think that a multiplayer game mode could be rather fun, with 4 people fighting amongst each other in the same way other auto battlers do. My final point of contention is that I would love to be able to distinguish units during combat, and the pixelated art style is just very uninspired and the need to constantly have to hover over each unit to know what it is gets tiring after a while, especially since it wasn’t necessary at all for it to exist if units were a bit more distinct from one another.
These are just small nitpicks, and nothing game-breaking. Speaking of which, the game crashed on me once when I decided to continue a game I had already won to see its “endless” mode but the developers warn you that that’s a very unstable feature, so that gets a pass, but keep that in mind if you’re looking out for that, that at least, at the moment.
One last note about the difficulty before we wrap this one up: the game is a lot of fun early on, and a lot of builds are viable, but in later difficulties, winning or losing can essentially come down to you either getting that precise card you needed, and it can be quite frustrating having to restart over and over because of RNG.
Final Score: 7/10
If you look at 9 Kings as the sort of time-waster videogame that makes you think, but not too much, so it’s perfect for a laidback experience after a tired day, you’ll love what’s on offer here. If you’re looking for something a bit more in-depth and complex, this won’t be for you The gameplay loop is addicting, and the limitations you have in tiles and in cards make every move a thrilling and impactful one, and on the hardest difficulties runs, 9 Kings can be nail-bitingly hard. It’s a great game you’ll spend playing for a week, every day, and then eventually stop and forget about it, or have running in the background while you wait for your mates to go play something else, and that’s fine because, for the price of 10 dollars, you could do a lot worse.
Support Strategy and Wargaming
I do what I do in Strategy and Wargaming because I love to do this, and I’m never going to stop. If you would like to support me with that, you can buy me a coffee for a dollar if you’re feeling generous. If you can’t, no worries, Strategy and Wargaming will always be free, and I’d love to have you around!
Leave a Reply to Top 25 Most Wishlisted Strategy Games On Steam – Strategy and WargamingCancel reply