Manor Lords is the dwarven fortress of city builders – here’s why

I should have enjoyed the beach. I was on vacation, far from my gaming PC and close to calming, rolling waves. Instead, my thoughts kept wandering to a landlocked country in 14th century Germany. Only a few games have embedded themselves in my brain like this Landlords.

The medieval “city builder with battles” like that Developer Slavic Magic describes it, is complex and challenging, with many moving parts and interdependencies. Sometimes it is extremely frustrating. There’s a satisfaction in this, like a multi-tiered puzzle box – you guess countless little solutions until they all add up to the satisfying click that finally opens the lid.

But I think what concerned me the most Landlords is not the complexity, the attention to detail, or even the satisfaction one feels when planning a city and watching it thrive. I think it’s Greg.

A guy named Greg

Landlords is a passion project. Greg Styczeń, who goes by Slavic Magic, has been working on his design for seven years. And there’s something funny about the entire development team behind a successful game being just this one guy named Greg.

But it’s not like you see Greg’s hand in every pixel – there are no jokes or Easter eggs, and even the graphics are based on historically accurate scans and show no individual style. Instead, the passionate part of the project lies in how the game works.

Landlords‘Villages and towns hustle and bustle. There is always activity. People and livestock transport goods between buildings, buildings are built from the ground up as you watch the progress, vendors shout from the marketplace, and farmland is plowed, sown, and harvested depending on the season. And you can just watch it all unfold, either zoomed out and watching from above as some, well, sir, or zoomed all the way down to ground level as you follow the people (or sheep) as they go about their daily tasks.

And Greg did it all.

Two brothers and some unfortunate dwarves

Stardew Valley has a similar story – it was developed by a single person over four years and has since sold more than 30 million copies. This is also true Undertale. And myself Minecraft. And a game called Dwarven fortress.

I was aware of it Dwarven fortress for a while and have even tried (and failed) a few times over the years. Then, in 2022, I caught COVID-19 and it blew my mind. After a few months of downtime, I finally decided to find out.

And I fell in love with this ridiculous, ASCII-graphics, supercharged spreadsheet of a game. It was still confusing and user-friendly, but it was starting to make sense. Well, most of it does – I still don’t really understand armies (and I even wrote a whole guide about them).

Dwarven fortress is another passion project from a single-digit development team. There are two – brothers Tarn and Zach Adams. Dwarven fortress has been in development since 2006 and is still technically in the alpha phase as of version 50.12. And it exudes the same sense of unique vision and attention to detail that you only get from someone who truly cares about what they create.

Dwarven fortress – and thus the Adams brothers – survived for almost 20 years solely on voluntary donations. The base game with its ASCII interface is Despite it free, even if the updated, graphical version is sold on Steam and itch.io. When it appeared on Steam in 2022, Dwarven fortress was the best seller that day and was picked up by 160,000 people. By the end of the first year, 800,000 copies had been sold.

In the first years the development of Slavic magic continued Landlords followed the Adams approach. The development was supported by a Patreon long before the demos or trailers even came out. The in-development videos shared by Slavic Magic showed off the details and obsessive care put into the game. And people noticed.

In the weeks before Manor lords With its early access launch, it became the most anticipated game of all time on Steam and over 3 million people wishlisted it. About a week later, it sold well over 1 million copies and in its first weekend it set the record for most concurrent players of any city simulation game.

Lord of everything

There’s this thing that happens in every game Landlords I’ve played. I’m building my cozy city where everyone is fed, clothed, warm and happy. From time to time I might even fend off some bandits. But when I try to expand into a neighboring region, I realize that I haven’t actually built the titular mansion. It just doesn’t occur to me – admittedly I tend to focus on the city building parts rather than the full-scale warfare. The fact that it keeps happening makes me think there’s something in my brain that just rejects feudalism (weird boast).

Landlords is set in the roughly historically correct 14th century and is therefore located somewhere between a pre- and a proto-capitalist society. Even Manor lords Marketplaces aren’t about money – at least not when you see it in the game. Instead, they are simply the place where goods are distributed to the families who need them. It is downright Collectivist if you think about it.

This breaks between Manor lords Regions, however. Trade requires wealth – beautiful houses and surplus goods. Even if you control two regions, you will need a fully functioning city in each region as they do not freely share their goods. As a landlord, I can’t just talk my two cities into some kind of useful redistribution of yarn – it’s more of a barter system that works best when each city specializes in something the other doesn’t. do not have (e.g. yarn in exchange for firewood).

And that’s up to me – the villagers Landlords already know what they are looking for. I can’t decide for them that from now on they’ll all just make firewood and trust that the nearest town will send them enough vegetables in return to survive the winter. There’s actually an interesting tension between me and the game. I learned the basics – how to build a city – but as I tried to put my knowledge into practice, I discovered new gaps and things I didn’t quite understand. Because of these frustrations, the game corrects me – Greg – and tells me more about the world.

Dwarven fortress it’s about finding these gaps in knowledge. Sure, forts will fall if you run out of food, but they will fail just as dramatically if, say, your brewer’s pet duck gets stuck in a tree for so long that it becomes discouraged and stops working, and then drives all the other dwarves crazy are due to lack of alcohol.

The (unofficial) motto of Dwarven fortress is “Losing is fun!” This game is because it is fun to see how a small mistake leads to a complete collapse of society. However, this applies to every other game as well. My failures and mistakes are a way for a game to say, “You’re almost there, but how it actually works is…” I may not always learn the lesson the first (or third) time, but eventually I will make it to emerge with a better understanding of the world and the story the game is telling.

Tailor-made fun

The success of Landlords and the other passion project games appeal to an audience looking for what they want and need from a game while eschewing more accessible and promoted games.

At the same time and more generally, there is a shift away from aggregation and towards curation. You can find it on sites like Substack (Apart from the Nazis) and the (re)emergence of newsletters – places where the information we consume is filtered through a single voice rather than flattened and distributed en masse. (Hey, nothing related, did you know Polygon has a newsletter?)

And you can see it in these games – games that are deeply themselves and have a well-developed voice of their own, whether they focus on historical accuracy, snogging peasants, or dwarven fortresses collapsing in tragic and hilarious ways. These games find a wide audience not because they’re so dull that they’re acceptable to everyone, but because they’re so patiently and carefully developed and, frankly, nerdy that you can’t help but appreciate them.

I always come back Landlords Not because it’s a perfect game, but because playing it feels like a deep conversation about someone’s interests. That’s because this is Greg’s game. Or Tarn’s game. Or Eric’s game. They didn’t make these passion projects for me – or for anyone, really – they made them for themselves. And that’s exactly what makes them so fascinating.