The Hundred Year Kingdom is coffee-break Civilization

The Hundred Year Kingdom, the inaugural release from Chorus Worldwide’s new “micro-indie” label Waku Waku Games, is just what I want from a strategy game, speaking as someone who has an appreciation for Sid Meier’s classic Civilization series, but who rarely plays it.

I like the Civilization series very much, but there are three reasons I don’t play it all that often. One: I’m not good at it. Two: it takes a very long time to play. Three: I get inordinately frustrated when the way I prefer to play is interrupted by wars I am woefully unprepared for.

The Hundred Year Kingdom neatly fixes all these issues I have with Civilization, providing a pleasingly gentle, relatively short-form experience that scratches a strategic itch without being overwhelming. And I am very much in love with it.

The Hundred Year Kingdom

In The Hundred Year Kingdom, you’re cast in the role of some sort of omnipotent, omniscient entity who, initially, is accompanied by the Japanese goddess Amaterasu. You’re given 100 years to develop an empty plot of land into a thriving civilisation, and your goal is simply to produce the best civilisation possible in that strict time limit — however you might define “best”.

Playing The Hundred Year Kingdom is extremely simple. Each year, you can take just one action — or skip the year altogether if you want to use it to build up your resources. That action always takes the form of developing one of the tiles of your land in some way. It may be preparing an undeveloped plot to put things on, or it may be upgrading a structure into something more powerful; either way, it takes a whole year for a single action to be resolved.

There are three main resources in The Hundred Year Kingdom: Food, Production and Culture. When establishing or upgrading a structure, it will cost varying quantities of one or more of these resources, and in most cases the resulting building will, in turn, produce one or more of the three resources for as long as it remains on the map. Thus the initial stages of your century in power will likely be spent establishing good sources of both Food and Production; Culture, although important to your final score and used for some structures later in the game, is not something you need to focus on right away.

The Hundred Year Kingdom

Upgrading a building usually has two distinct paths to follow. In some cases, the different paths will focus exclusively on Food, Production or Culture, while in others you may be able to favour the production of one resource while still bringing in a trickle of one or more of the others. It’s important to learn the various “routes” you need to take in order to acquire various buildings, because as you progress through the game you’ll start developing your own particular priorities that will help you to succeed.

The game would perhaps benefit from having a full, browsable “tech tree” to refer to; there may well be one available, since the game’s developer has certainly posted a screenshot of one on Twitter, but I’m buggered if I could find it in the game’s interface. Given the fairly limited number of structures available, it’s perhaps a small nitpick, but it would make the overall game experience a bit neater and easier to develop strategies for.

Where things get more interesting is when you start unlocking “Legacy” buildings — these are essentially the equivalent of Civilization’s Wonders, and take the form of famous structures from around the world. Building these has no effect by itself, but in most cases they produce Food, Production or Culture according to how many of a specific type of structure you have on the map. For example, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon become more effective the more Water Wheels you have on the map, and Amsterdam becomes more effective the more Windmills you have.

The Hundred Year Kingdom

Thus optimising your kingdom becomes about picking your Legacy structures wisely and planning the rest of your kingdom accordingly — even knowing that that might sometimes mean making “suboptimal” use of other tiles. Chichen Itza, for example, produces potentially vast amounts of Food according to how many Farmland tiles you have on the map; Farmland by itself is a fairly low-yield tile; when combined with Chichen Itza it can be a formidable source of the Food resource — but is that the best use of the limited space you have available?

Optionally, you can follow the prayers of the people and build specifically requested structures in order to obtain various “offerings”, usually in the form of a small handout of one of the three resources. This can be a good guide on what to build for your first game or two, but in practice it’s probably more optimal to focus on obtaining a particular Legacy structure (or several ones which work together) and optimising your land accordingly. Your final “rating” upon the end of the 100 years is based on your total production of all the resources, plus how effective your various Legacy structures were, after all.

Initially, The Hundred Year Kingdom gives you just a single map to play on, but with each new playthrough, you unlock new starting maps and new “Oracles” to offer you advice along the way. Each Oracle is associated with a particular Legacy structure and can help make that more effective — plus the more you use a specific Oracle the more they will level up and provide small passive bonuses to your overall resource production in particular areas. This can help considerably in attaining higher final ratings — so repeated play is a must if you want to get the most out of the game.

The Hundred Year Kingdom

There are a few minor nitpicks with The Hundred Year Kingdom, but I’ve saved these for last as they’re really not all that important. They’re mostly to do with clumsy translations — “Optimal” is used throughout the interface to indicate your high scores instead of “Best”, for example, and in a couple of cases different names are used to refer to the same structure.

There are also a few references to “tapping” things that perhaps betray an intent for the game to have been a mobile title at one point, or maybe an assumption that it would be played on the Switch’s touchscreen. The controls can also be a little sluggish at times — not a huge deal in a turn-based strategy game, of course, but ideally it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

These really are minor issues at best, though — the core gameplay of The Hundred Year Kingdom is immensely sound, enjoyable, easily understandable and thoroughly compelling. It provides exactly the sort of experience I want from a Civilization-style game — a relatively short-form, non-violent experience in which I can focus on expanding and upgrading rather than making ready for war — and does so with plenty of personality and straightforward but attractive presentation.

Definitely a great game to have available to you when you want something a bit more “gentle” to just sit back and relax with — just try not to feel too bad as the end of your century rolls around and Amaterasu looks really sad about having to part ways with you!

The Hundred Year Kingdom is available now on PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch.

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Pete Davison
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