Vertical Kingdom

My honest first reaction to Vertical Kingdom was mild confusion, then mild embarrassment that I hadn't figured out the card economy faster. The premise sounds deceptively breezy: rebuild a post-war empire one city at a time, limited horizontal space forcing you to stack everything skyward. In practice, the decision loop is tighter than the pitch suggests. Each turn you select from five deck categories, draw building cards, and then commit. No take-backs. Every placement is permanent, which means misreading your food-to-population ratio two turns ago costs you three turns later when the city starts strangling itself for lack of brick production. The resource chain is where the real strategy lives. Food, water, bricks, wood, stone, and metal all interact, and your card draws determine what structures you can actually place. That intersection of RNG and planning sits somewhere between a deckbuilder and a spatial puzzle. Players who enjoy games like Against the Storm or Stacklands will recognise the rhythm quickly: read the run, adapt the plan, accept that variance is part of the contract. The expedition structure adds a roguelite backbone, sending you out to randomized regions with differing terrain constraints and resource shortages, then taxing the results back to your overarching empire progression. I want to flag two friction points clearly. First, the UI is a genuine obstacle early on. Multiple overlapping systems land at once with explanations that assume familiarity, and the card type distribution can feel arbitrary until the underlying logic clicks. One vocal segment of Steam reviewers refunded specifically because an expedition failure near completion wiped all imperial resource gains from the entire chain, which is a punishing design call for a game marketed as cozy. Second, there is no deck-thinning or card removal mechanic, so duplicate buildings you no longer need accumulate and dilute draw quality over time. For strategy players used to having levers to pull, that absence stings. Here is the case for newcomers anyway. The individual expedition sessions are short enough to be mentally restartable. The vertical constraint actually makes spatial planning less overwhelming than a sprawling 2D city builder because the problem space is narrow and legible. Difficulty scales with kingdom population size rather than a single brutal difficulty wall, so early runs function as a functional tutorial even without explicit guidance. Think of it less as a city builder and more as a turn-based puzzle with a resource economy wrapped around it, and the learning curve flattens considerably. The game is a solo project from developer David at Farlight Games Industry, and the craft shows in the pixel art and the tightness of the core loop. What it lacks is depth of late-game levers and that extra layer of strategic mitigation that would push it from a curio to a recommendation without caveats. Fans of Against the Storm who want something shorter, calmer, and card-driven will find genuine appeal here. Pure city-builder players expecting Frostpunk-style density of decisions should look elsewhere.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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