The Royal Writ is a creative deck-building game that’s cute, quirky and comical in its presentation. But this “roguelike” title has some dark humor tucked up its puffy, medieval sleeves, and it comes with an unexpected M-rating.
The game story is presented in two distinct acts:
Act 1 introduces us to King Mikolt II, an anthropomorphic crow-like character who rules over the kingdom of Aranfold with a narcissistic flourish. When the king’s manipulating Cohort Council of advisers—disguised in 17th-century plague doctor masks—push him to show any citizens who disagree with him who’s boss, the self-centered royal quickly agrees while adjusting his crown in the mirror.
His haughty highness sends troops off with a royal decree demanding that naysayers desist. (Which, of course, means that any complainers, including academics and the king’s own father, get the ax.) The result, however, is that the kingdom’s citizens are not pleased. That gives the royal advisers an opportunity to overthrow his crow-ish majesty and take power.
Misery ensues.
Act 2 finds the now ex-king waking up to his weak-willed folly and spurring his last loyal subjects to take up a new invention: something called a “gun.” Perhaps this destructive device will keep the plague doctor council—which is actually a gaggle of skeletal demons—from corrupting the land.
Outside of that somewhat whimsical and picture book-like storyline, the main thrust of the game takes place on a linear map. Players navigate through a series of mapped nodes that represent battles, special events and other differentiated areas, such as gifting zones, sacrificial opportunities, character shops and the like. The goal is to build up a deck of character and accessory cards that you can take into battle.
The cards are divided up into groups of blue strength cards—each having a specific base damage number—and red multiplier character cards, each holding a multiplier value. These cards will work together to present an attack number that strikes against an enemy’s health points (HP) during each round of a battle.
So, if you were to simply place three blue cards with values of say, a 3, a 2 and a 10, then that round would add up to a total of 15 attack points. But if you placed two blue cards and a red multiplier (3, 2 and x10) your attack total would jump to 50. As more and more cards are laid down, the compounding tally grows and the foe’s HP is diminished.
A standard play field generally consists of up to three lanes and four to six squares (columns) per horizontal lane. Played cards move square by square before reaching the enemy fortifications. If your chosen cards wipe out the enemy’s HP, you win. But if any character card reaches the enemy base before extinguishing that HP, that card can be permanently lost. The lane squares can also contain traps, poisonous swamps, multipliers, status changes and treasure chests that negatively or positively impact your attack-point tallies.
For instance, having a poisoned character generally lowers your army’s morale number. Which, in turn, impacts your attack points. But some cards—such as a pelican-like nun card—actually spur the army on with higher attack numbers when the army’s morale is low.
That general game description may sound confusing. And there is, frankly, a steep learning curve here. But with a little time, it all becomes intuitive. And The Royal Writ gives you extra aid in your initial runs, helping you get into the process of using all the many character types, equipment addons and consumable cards that you can build into your deck.
The Royal Writ is a single-player game with no local co-op or online multiplayer options.
This game asks players to plan in advance and consider all the ways that the scores of different character cards might work together to create a strong dominant deck.
The Royal Writ starts with relatively easy early steps but then folds in more difficult obstacles—which include Challenges, runs with special rules, and Hardships, runs with stacking modifiers—that make future play fresh and tricky. (Without being too arduous for younger gamers.)
For all of its storybook-like cuteness The Royal Writ purposely leans into some M-rated elements in its kings-and-conquests world. There’s nothing sexually offensive or involving foul language here. But there are some darker bits.
For example, a crazed Middle Ages dentist wants to pull teeth from your units, offering relics in exchange. But those relics aren’t always positive, and the tooth-yanking can lower a character card’s numbers or destroy it all together.
Cards can also be afflicted with certain ailments, such as being poisoned, frozen, made frail, tortured, left bleeding or turned into a powerless ghost. Those ailments might lead to benefits (bleeding characters can sometimes gain short-term improved attacks, for instance) or lead to weakness and death of the card.
There are Sacrificial map nodes that offer a random character card in exchange for the ritual-like “sacrifice” of an existing character.
Some addons are actually medieval torture implements, such as a multi-spiked Iron Maiden card that leaves its victim bleeding. Some of the character cards and relics involve alcohol, such as the Drunken Frog card, which grows stronger as it gets closer to dying.
Act 2 introduces bullets, poisoned knives and exploding projectiles flying at your lanes of character cards—attacks that can weaken or kill them.
(It should be noted that all of the sometimes cruel or brutal elements here are presented in a children’s picture book format as dark, winking humor.)
The Royal Writ has a lot going for it, as challenging deck-builder games go. But its cute exterior masks some unexpectedly dark and mature humor.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
