Medieval Dominance

Rule one of the great houses of medieval Europe - and understand from the first week that every rival crown is playing the same game you are. They marry, trade, scheme, borrow, besiege and betray without you, and the campaign ends the way the age demanded: one house standing over all the rest.

YOUR HOUSE IS PEOPLE, NOT NUMBERS
Your line is characters with names, skills, appetites and grudges. Heirs are born, educated, wed and crowned; councillors hold real offices with real hands on your realm; the family tree remembers every generation the chronicle has held. People form friendships, swear brotherhood, nurse rivalries - and what was done to them is not forgotten just because the one who did it died.

A LIVING CHRISTENDOM
The Church is the real one. The Pope holds court in Rome and history moves his seat; interdict and excommunication have teeth; there are monasteries to endow, relics to hold, pilgrimages to survive and crusades to answer. Piety is a currency, and so is defiance.

WAR THE MEDIEVAL WAY
Levies and garrisons, sieges that starve before they storm, ransom and captivity, hostages held as surety, hired free companies with names and appetites, and quarrels settled at the fence in judicial combat. Victory in the field is one road to dominance - rarely the cheapest.

AN ECONOMY OF GRAIN AND COIN
Tallage and tolls, granaries against lean winters, seasonal fairs, moneylenders whose patience has limits, and a mint that can thin its own silver if you dare. Harvests answer the year's weather, and a great winter is remembered.

A REALM OF KNIVES
Plots, secrets, leverage and dread. A crown that rules by fear keeps a ledger it will one day be shown. Prisons hold what battle takes; a contested succession can put a pretender in the field with your own kin's name on his lips.

EVERY WEEK A DECISION
Play a full campaign in sittings that fit a phone: one week of the realm at a time, with a weekly seeded challenge and Game Center leaderboards to measure your best line against the world.

Begin as a great house - or begin as nobody in the Origins campaign and earn the hall your line will be named for.