Crown of England

December 1135. The king is dead and has no son. Six lords want the crown. You choose one, each with strengths and a weakness of his own: Lord Edmund of Wessex is the best diplomat, Lord Roland of Kent the best knight in the lists, Lord Oswald of Northumbria is poor and far away but has the hardest foot soldiers. The lords and their houses are invented; the places are real. The map is drawn from the Natural Earth coastlines and divided into 34 provinces around real towns, from Bamburgh to Canterbury.

A turn is a month. With three to five actions you march, raise troops, build, make treaties, go raiding or hold a tournament. Provinces yield gold and food; soldiers cost both, and winter brings little harvest. The rival lords weigh their own moves and send envoys with a truce, an alliance or a trade agreement. You win by taking every rival's home castle, or by holding London, 18 provinces and 60 fame for three months. Lose your own home castle and your house has fallen.

Four moments you play yourself. In the joust you first choose your pace; then you look over your own shield, aim the lance against the swaying of the gallop, and strike as the ring around his shield turns gold. At a siege you aim a throwing engine with a real flight path and wind, choose stone, heavy stone or fire pot, and the stones of the wall break one by one until there is a breach. In the sword fight your opponent attacks high or low; block in time and you can strike back. The battle is real-time: regiments, formations and morale, and whoever does not hold the field by dusk withdraws.

The 60 paintings and poses were made with gpt-image-2, in the clear-line style; the arms and colours of each house are coloured in per house. Music and sound are original Web Audio synthesis: eight pieces, 46 sounds and four backgrounds. There is a demo in which the computer plays all six lords, a cheat mode, and saving in five slots plus an autosave in the browser. A tribute to Defender of the Crown (Cinemaware, 1986): that idea inspired this game, the names, rules, pictures and music are new. Built with Phaser 3, TypeScript and Vite, with Claude Code as programming assistant. 182 unit tests in Vitest check the rules, the rival lords and the four scenes; end-to-end tests in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit play a campaign by hand, let every scene play itself out and check seven screen sizes.