The King Is Watchingcondenses kingdom-building strategy to a single screen

As satisfying as a successful real-time strategy game campaign can be, dealing with a complex RTS map can often be overwhelming. Keeping track of multiple far-flung resource-production bases, groups of units, upgrade trees, and surprise encounters with the enemy requires a level of attention-splitting that can strain even the best multitaskers.

Then there's The King Is Watching, which condenses the standard real-time strategy production loop into an easy-to-understand single-screen interface, complete with automatic battles. The game's unique resource management system—combined with well-designed, self-balancing difficulty and randomized upgrades that keep each run fresh—makes The King Is Watching one of the most enjoyable pick-up-and-play strategy titles I've encountered in a long time.

What is the king watching, exactly?

The bulk of the action in The King Is Watching takes place on a small, 5x5 grid of squares representing your castle. That's where you'll place blueprint tiles from your hand that then start producing the basic and refined resources necessary to place even more blueprints. Those resources also power the factories that crank out defensive units that automatically fight to protect your castle from periodic waves of enemies (in adorable pixelated animations that take place on a battlefield to the right of your castle).

Sounds simple enough. But the entire castle can't be actively productive at once. Instead, only a few contiguous tiles within the area of the "king's gaze" can make resources and/or units at any one time.

That means you have to constantly and actively drag and rotate your "gaze" around your castle, prioritizing the resources and units you need immediately and leaving others that can wait for the king's attention. You have to be careful with the relative positioning of your blueprints so that units and resources that complement each other can be produced in the same "gaze" without a lot of unproductive downtime (say, when you've hit your unit limit) or resource droughts.