Have You Played… Crown and Council?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Don’t be tricked by the name, Crown and Council has nothing to do with monarchy or getting questionable advice from Cromwellian figures in black. Instead, it’s all about itty bitty expansionism on random maps, painting the tiny world your colour because your colour is the best colour. God bless the Blue nation. Death to the Orange interlopers. Death to all the interlopers.

How you bring about those abstract, unseen deaths is all down to two things: your purse and how you use it. On a basic level, your conquests involve throwing gold at strategically important provinces until your foes are wiped out. On a more complex level (but only slightly more – this is as simple and lean as strategy games are likely to get) you buy ships to invade coastal regions, build castles to strengthen provinces against attack, and race to control mines for a higher income.

It isn’t going to revolutionise your world, or replace your favourite grand strategy. But it doesn’t want to. It’s just there to offer some bitesize, single player strats. Best of all, it’s free and it just got a fresh oiling under the bonnet.