9 Kings Leaves Early Access With Joker Mode

The crown is official now. 9 Kings, the fast kingdom-building roguelike from one-person Brazilian developer Sad Socket, has left Early Access and launched its full 1.0 version on PC, published by Hooded Horse and Sidekick Publishing. It's on Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass subscribers can play it right away. A mobile version is also available on iOS and Android through Playdigious.

The game's loop is compact on purpose. You pick one of nine kings, lay out a kingdom from a deck of cards, and defend it against waves of rival rulers, recruiting wizards, dragons, undead armies and kamikaze bombers as the rounds escalate. Runs are built to finish in about half an hour, which is the whole pitch: a strategy game with real build depth that doesn't ask for your whole evening.

The headline addition is Joker mode, one of four modes in the full release. It lets players write their own rules and build a starting deck from nine cards drawn across all nine kings, mixing abilities the standard game keeps in separate silos. The other modes cover single-player runs across dozens of difficulty levels, multiplayer battles against other players' winning builds, and a quest mode that works through nine lands of structured challenges.

The content count grew past the original plan. The launch version carries more than 130 cards, up from the 81 the developer first scoped, plus more than 30 new edicts, stronger rainbow cards, additional perks and daily quests. The nine kings themselves are the other finished promise: the Early Access build started with six, and 1.0 ships with all nine, each rebalanced for the full release.

The price is doing some of the marketing. 9 Kings lists at $19.99, with a 50 percent launch discount running through its first two weeks, and its Steam audience has rated it Very Positive, at about 90 percent, through the Early Access run. It supports roughly 30 languages, which is how a one-person Brazilian studio ends up with a worldwide ladder to climb in the multiplayer mode.

Graduations like this one are the healthy version of Early Access. The game that launched this week is measurably bigger than the game that was promised — more kings, more cards, a mode that exists because players spent a year finding the edges of the old ones. Joker mode is the tell. A developer only hands players the rulebook when the underlying system is strong enough to survive being bent.