Kingdom

Also known as: N/A

Developer: Commodore

When I heard of a strategy game called "Kingdom," I didn't really expect it to be a simulation game about buying land and planting food…but that's essentially what you've got in this game. Each year of the game, you need to figure out how to have enough food to both feed your people (and the growing population) and to plant into the ground to produce more food for the coming year. If you overfeed your people, the population tends to increase faster, which means you've got more mouths to feed. If you underfeed your population, they may riot. Other events pop up at random to also keep things interesting. Aside from managing food, you're also buying and selling land in this game - after all, it's hard to plant crops if you don't have land to plant them in. The main goal of the game is to obtain a total wealth of one million units (that includes acres of land and bushels of food) and if you're able to obtain that much land and food, without disasters or rioters destroying it, then you've beaten the game. Kingdom seems like it was a fairly popular game for its time, ported to a few different computers, but I, personally, didn't really find it nearly as interesting as some of the other strategy games from around the same time period. Still, though, Kingdom is still an okay game for what it is, and for the time that it was released, so if you're looking for an old, text-based strategy game where you buy land and feed (or stave) the people of your kingdom, then Kingdom is a decent game to play.

Review added: 03/05/2025