Crown and Council

Crown and Council is a strategy game that challenges users to conquer land and defeat the enemy.

Crown and Council is a game developed by none other than the famous Mojang studio, who you might know as the developers of Minecraft and a number of small titles. They are known for thinking outside the box and for coming up with strange ideas for games, and we can say that Crown and Council is as strange as it gets, although it’s easy to spot the Risk influence.

Some of the players might notice that Crown and Council is a little bit similar to the famous board game Risk, but only slightly. In that board game, you can conquer additional territories, but you’re using dice rolls to decide the fate of the battles. There are no dies in this game, so any element of chance has been removed, at least during the match.

The game was born during a jam, one of those events that challenge developers to build a game in just a couple of days. Most of the stuff that is made during jams is not all that interesting, but some of the titles prove to be quite interesting, and Crown and Council is one of them.

The gameplay idea is really simple. You start with a single territory and a few coins. When you conquer a new territory you spend one coin and each land that you own will generate one coin for you, but not in the turn after you’ve taken it. The AI is doing the same thing, and the only thing that’s different is the fact that the world is generated each time.

It’s not difficult, but sometimes it feels that the AI is cheating, or at least it’s doing something nefarious to make things harder. Other time, the map generation mechanism fails and places the country's AI too close to you, and you can buy it during the first round, winning the game

Crown and Council has its share of technical problems, and you might notice that the mouse clicks don’t seem to respond the same, all the time. It’s a fun game, with a short life, and it’s free.