Kings or Commons

August 1642. You are nobody in particular, on the street in Much Wenlock, and a paper has just gone up on the Guildhall saying the King has raised his standard against his Parliament at Nottingham.

Pick a name from the ones people actually had. Then pick a side, because everyone is about to have to. Take the King’s shilling from the serjeant at the market cross and go to Shrewsbury, where Charles is raising regiments and melting down college plate to pay them. Or go north with the carrier to Nantwich, where Sir William Brereton holds Cheshire for the Parliament and nobody will ask what your father was.

Both roads lead to Edgehill, and Marston Moor, and Naseby. After that they part for good: one ends with a crown, the other with Cromwell’s chair. Neither ending is clean.

It is a tile-by-tile first-person crawl - step, turn, look, act - through eight places in England as the wars pass over them. The Chronicle records the real history behind every scene you walk into, kept deliberately separate from the fiction, so you can always tell which is which. Where the Royalist road departs from what actually happened, at Naseby in June 1645, the game stops and tells you so.

THE ROAD

There are six chapters, each one a small map you walk tile by tile, and each set in a real place on a real date. Two of them depend on the side you choose:

1. Much Wenlock, Shropshire - the Guildhall, the ruined Priory, the smithy. The war arrives as a notice on a door.
2. Shrewsbury or Nantwich - the first real choice. Shrewsbury is the King’s muster, with Prince Rupert and a mint coining college silver. Nantwich has the Parliament’s trained bands, the press and the men of the Covenant. You swear an oath at the end of either one.
3. Edgehill, Warwickshire, October 1642 - the first great battle, and Rupert’s charge. Nobody wins, and both armies spend a frozen night on the field.
4. Marston Moor, Yorkshire, July 1644 - the largest battle ever fought on English soil, Cromwell’s horse, and Newcastle’s Whitecoats, who would not surrender.
5. Naseby, Northamptonshire, June 1645 - the New Model Army, the sunken lane, and the captured cabinet of the King’s letters. This is where the Royalist road leaves history.
6. Oxford, spring 1646, or Whitehall, January 1649 - the end, from one side or the other. The King’s road ends at his court in Christ Church, with an army that hasn’t been paid. The Parliament’s road goes on to the High Court of Justice, the thirtieth of January, the Levellers at Burford, and the offer of a crown.

HOW IT PLAYS

Each tile is a step. Walk up to anything marked on the map and press Z to read it. Most scenes end in a choice of two to four things to do, and every choice changes you a little. There are four things to keep track of:

• Steel is how well you fight.
• Wit is how well you talk, notice and get away.
• Standing is what people think of you, and it decides your rank and your ending.
• Purse is your money, in shillings.

Some choices only appear if you have enough of the right thing. A clever answer needs wit, and buying your way through needs money.

FIGHTS

Three times on the road, at the push of pike, against Newcastle’s Whitecoats and in the sunken lane at Naseby, you have to fight. Each enemy is tougher than the one before. Every turn you choose one of four things:

1. Strike - roll a die plus your steel against their skill. Land it and they take damage, and more steel means bigger blows.
2. Guard - set yourself. It makes their next blow much more likely to miss.
3. Parley - try to talk them out of it, with a die plus your wit. It’s hard against anyone serious, but if it works the fight is over with no blood spilled.
4. Retreat - give ground and live, at the cost of a little standing. With enough wit it nearly always works.

Win a fight and you gain standing and steel. Fall, and the game ends the way the war ended for most of the people who fought in it.

TIPS

• Read everything. Almost every scene raises at least one of your stats, and most of standing comes from the small choices, not the fights.
• Wit is a safety net. A character with good wit can talk out of or walk away from a fight that a character with only steel would have to win.
• Guard when you’re losing. When the enemy’s blows are landing, a turn of guarding is often worth more than one more swing.
• You heal on the road. Every new chapter restores some health and raises your maximum, so a hard fight at the end of a chapter is less dangerous than one at the start.
• Aim high for the top ending. There are four endings on each side: you fall, you go home to Shropshire, you finish the war as a colonel of foot, or, with enough standing, you end up running the country.

THE CHRONICLE

Press X at any time to open the Chronicle. Every scene you walk into adds an entry: the real history behind it, written separately from the story so the two never blur. When the Royalist road leaves history at Naseby, the game says so in plain words. By the end, the Chronicle is a short, readable history of the Civil Wars, seen from one ordinary person’s road through them.

BEHIND THE GAME

Kings or Commons is a blobber, the 1980s first-person dungeon crawl where you walk a grid one square at a time and the walls are drawn in perspective. Here the dungeons are Shropshire streets, muster fields and battlefields. The view is drawn in red and yellow lines on black, Spectrum style, and the text is drawn with a bitmap font built into the game, so it stays sharp and readable at the Spectrum’s tiny resolution.

Every map in the game is checked by a script that walks it from its starting tile and proves that every scene and every exit can actually be reached. Another script plays both sides’ roads from Much Wenlock to an ending, opening every scene and fighting every fight.