SAY TO THE KING, MY LORD

SAY TO THE KING, MY LORD  (or sttkml) is a Bronze Age court simulation about keeping a kingdom alive as the world around it begins to collapse. You rule through movable text windows: hearing petitions, reading reports, sending letters, and deciding which problems your dwindling stores can afford to solve.

Grain, trade, labour, soldiers, temples, palace offices, and the royal household all compete for your attention. Harvests can fail, routes can close, debts accumulate, and neighbouring courts have their own demands. Paying one group may leave another hungry. A promise that buys you time now can become a crisis later.

The game tries to capture the uncertainty of ruling at a distance. Reports arrive late, people disagree, and a merchant’s claim is not the same thing as grain in your storehouse. You have to act on what you know and live with what you missed.

There are eight playable courts, including Ugarit, Pylos, Pi-Ramesses, and Hattusa, with different resources, obligations, and forms of government. The aim is to survive the pressures of a Bronze Age collapse and keep your court, household, and kingdom together.

An optional Ollama edition uses a local language model to give letters and replies dynamic wording as the campaign develops. The simulation tracks the goods, promises, and consequences behind those words. The offline edition uses authored text and is fully playable without an LLM.

Builds are available for Windows x64, Linux x86-64, and recent Apple Silicon Macs. This is an early alpha: long campaigns need balancing, some disputes repeat, and the interface takes practice.

I built this with substantial AI assistance. I like the idea, but I don’t like the flavour that assistance left in parts of the writing and presentation. I’m sorry for that. There’s still work to do to make it feel like the game I wanted to make.

Critical feedback is very welcome. Tell me what’s confusing, boring, broken, or just doesn’t work for you. Negative comments are greatly appreciated; just please don’t curse me out.

Source code and development on GitHub. You can also report bugs there.