Reigns

About Reigns

Look, I’m not usually a mobile game guy. My phone is for work calls, Slack, and doomscrolling news between flights. But last Tuesday, stuck at the gate in O’Hare for the third time that month, I needed something that wasn’t a black hole for my time. Reigns is basically Tinder for medieval kings. You swipe left or right on royal decisions—tax the peasants, ban the jester, marry the princess from a neighboring kingdom. Each choice tips four bars: Church, People, Military, and Treasury. Let any one of them hit zero and boom, your reign ends. You die. Your kingdom collapses. Game over. Then you start a new ruler and try again. It sounds dumb but it’s weirdly addictive because each run is only about five minutes. I’ve already burned through maybe twenty kings and I don’t feel guilty about it because the whole point is to lose and learn.

Features & Highlights

The cleverest thing here is that the game doesn’t explain anything. At first I hated that. There’s no tutorial popup telling me that helping the Church too much makes the Military hate me and then I get assassinated. You learn by dying. And you die a lot. I had a run where I ignored the People for three turns and suddenly there was a revolution and my castle got torched. Another time I got too cozy with the Pope-equivalent and my own guards poisoned my wine. The cards you collect between rulers unlock new characters and events, so every run feels slightly different even though the core loop is the same. The art is simple but charming—these little tarot-card style portraits with text blocks. No flashy animations. No sound effects that make you look like a weirdo on the train. The music is a single haunting lute track that loops. It fits the mood perfectly. You get achievements too, but I ignore those because I’m not here to collect digital trophies.

User Experience

Here’s the thing about Reigns that works for my impatient brain: a single decision takes maybe three seconds. Swipe right to approve a tax increase. Swipe left to reject a marriage proposal. The consequences show up immediately. Your treasury goes up, your People bar drops, and a new card appears. There’s no loading screen, no waiting for animations, no “are you sure?” nonsense. It’s just pure input-output. Perfect for when you’ve got two minutes before a Zoom call. The downside is that sometimes the randomness feels cheap. I lost a perfectly good run because a random event forced me into a lose-lose choice where both options dropped a bar to zero. That’s not strategy, that’s a middle finger. And the game doesn’t have a save-and-exit properly—if you close the app mid-run, you lose that reign entirely. Caught me off guard the first time. Now I just accept it.

Pricing

It’s a paid app. I think I dropped like four or five bucks on it. No ads, no microtransactions, no “watch a video to revive your king” garbage. That’s the only reason I even considered buying it. I’d rather pay once and get a complete experience than install a free game that nags me every thirty seconds. For what it is, the price is fine. You’ll get a solid ten hours out of it before the novelty wears thin, and maybe more if you’re the completionist type who wants to unlock every card and ending. I’m not that person, so I’ll probably delete it after a week. But for the cost of a sandwich, it’s a fair trade.

Updates & Support

Support was disappointing. I had an issue where my save data didn’t sync between my phone and my iPad. Emailed them through the app on a Tuesday afternoon. Got an auto-reply saying they’d get back to me in 48 hours. On Friday, I got a generic message telling me to “try reinstalling the app.” Real helpful. I reinstalled and obviously lost my progress. There wasn’t even an apology or a follow-up. The game has apparently gotten a few updates over the years—new event cards, balance tweaks—but none since I’ve owned it. It’s not abandoned, but it’s not exactly thriving with support either. Feels like they shipped it and moved on.

Security & Privacy

It doesn’t ask for any permissions beyond basic storage for save files. No account required. No tracking or analytics that I can find in the settings. You just download it and play. For a paid app from a known developer like Devolver Digital, I’d expect that. The only minor thing is that if you want cloud saves, you have to manually link it to Game Center, and even then it’s spotty as I found out. Privacy-wise, it’s the least intrusive mobile game I’ve used. No pop-ups asking for my email or notifications begging me to come back. Thank God.