Reigns

Introduction

Reigns is a simple premise, a minimalist design and an absolutely perfect execution. Devolver digital brings a new take on both story based rogue-likes and playing card games. The gameplay cannot be easier with you only having to swipe left and right to decide how to dictate your rule. The difficulty comes from making the right decisions, sometimes against the clock. Your role is to maintain your reign and your kingdom for as long as possible while balancing the needs of your citizens. It sounds easy in practice but in true rogue-like fashion dying is like a box of chocolates…

Glossary

Platforms and Language – 7/10

Reigns is available for free on the app store and for £1.99 on Steam. The base game has hours of medieval content and is more than satisfactory on its own, however Reigns also has DLC available, from expansion decks to Game of Thrones cross overs. If the setting isn’t your thing there is also a free modern day version called Lapse which will most likely have a review in the near future.

All instances of Reigns can be set into Japanese from the options menu at any point.

Usability – 7/10

Reigns is a brilliant little time waster with simple gameplay and yet it is a brilliant example of how applying a method or investing time into vocabulary can make a huge difference to the impact of the tools we use to study. The vocabulary in reigns is based heavily around the four major aspects you will be maintaining; Religion, population, military and finance. You will often be approached to make the right decision when it comes to building a new church or preparing defenses against an oncoming rival army but you must ensure you are understanding what you are doing or the consequences of your decisions will quickly have you thrown in to the dungeons to be eaten by rats.

It is not often in day to day conversations that you will need the words to discuss military tactics but if you enjoy this theme of game you will see the expressions time and time again elsewhere. I attribute my success with games such as Ghost of Tsushima and Nioh to my time spent with Reigns. Even if the specialist grammar isn’t to your liking, the game is one big conversation and as such can help you practice all manner of questions, sentence structures and casual conversation verb forms. You will also find that after unlocking characters they will come and talk to you frequently, even mentioning other characters and their suspicious activity. You will find in a broad sense that named locations aren’t mentioned frequently, likely due to the changing times and interactions of the kingdom, however these long standing characters act as an opportunity to see how relationships between you and others are discussed. In textbook dialogue a lot of 1 to 1 back and forth dialogue is taught so this is an opportunity to see discussions of a wider scope.

99% of the content for you to review is the cards but you will also find a variety of death screens and character cards to collect as well as the little phrases and challenges between the rules of each successive monarch. These are infrequent and fleeting so you may not get as much out of them as the main gameplay but I think that’s more than made up for.

The primary strength of Reigns is that it is inherently a word game. Very few visual cues will aid the way you play and as such it forces you into an environment where you have to understand not only the vocabulary or the kanji but the entire context of each phrase. The repeatability also gives incentive for you to be stronger in language. If you want to live longer it’s hard enough doing it in English but doing this in a second language will all that’s thrown at you is downright impressive. I have garnered a lot of success in my studying from Reigns, however this is mostly attributed to the time I have spent playing it and the overly meticulous work put in to build my medieval vocabulary. Reigns for me was one of the early games that cemented the mindset of looking at games as a tool as well as a hobby so it will always have a special place in my heart.

Challenges and Methods – 2/10

Surviving

Reigns is not a game of variety and as such you won’t find very many sub-sections of the game where you can hone method or learn smaller sections of dialogue. What you can do is play as the game intended and survive as long as possible. As I say above, this is hard enough to do in English so it can be great fun to learn how you died and what caused it as well as understanding and utilizing the occasional power ups to reign as long as possible