Gap Week: April 19, 2024 (Manor Lords First Impression)

Hey folks, this week is a bit of a gap week as I am heading out to the annual meeting of the Society for Military History (and, indeed, by the time you read this, I will be there). Normally, I post the abstract of my conference talk for these sorts of things, but since I am moderating a roundtable, I don’t have an abstract or paper to share.

However, I have been able to play the upcoming medieval city-builder-strategy hybrid Manor Lords as they let me have a review-code, so I thought I might share some of my quick first impressions of that. We are in that magic window where the embargo on impressions is lifted, but before the embargo on reviews, so I can tell you about my experience playing the game, but I cannot yet answer if it is worth buying or good or not or that kind of thing. Also, I should note that the build I am playing is a pre-release build of a game that is releasing into early access later this month, so this is the pre-pre-release build. Large parts of it are unfinished, because that’s how early access works.

What I can say is that Manor Lords has an interesting angle on the medieval town and the city-builder genre. Like Farthest Frontier (the main competition in this space) there is a lot of Banished DNA in the game, but neither game is a Banished-clone. Both of them push off in different directions. If I had to simplify, I’d say that Farthest Frontier is about building a medieval town – an urban center with a civic government mostly notable for its economic production – whereas Manor Lords is, as the title implies, about building a castle-town, a settlement nucleated around the private house (the manor) of a military aristocrat (the lord) who owns the land and which can be primarily understood as a settlement primarily military in character.

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