I built Atheling because I wanted this game myself. Whenever I travel, I look for games that work well offline, don’t hammer the battery, and are easy to play one-handed in portrait. I’d played Polytopia to death and couldn’t find something else that played well without draining my battery. So, while I was on holiday in Tunisia, I started building one by the pool on my phone using Replit. Atheling became a text-based historical strategy game where you rule England through different periods of history. You deal with succession, marriages, wars, claims, relationships and political decisions, but history is only the starting point. Your choices feed into a simulation, so campaigns can quickly head in completely different directions. One of the things I’ve had the most fun with is the tooling behind it. I built a separate dev studio in Replit that can run Monte Carlo simulations across large numbers of campaigns, helping me find balance problems and strange outcomes that would be almost impossible to catch through manual playtesting alone. The underlying system is also much more general than Atheling itself. It works from a historical corpus and can generate the characters, territories and maps needed to play, so the same foundations could eventually be used for completely different periods of history. It’s built with React and Capacitor, works offline, has no ads, and uses a simple one-time unlock rather than subscriptions or consumable currencies. This started as a holiday experiment, so seeing it turn into an actual App Store game has been a lot of fun. I submitted it to Shipaton which is quite cool but something I was just playing around with. I’d genuinely love feedback, especially from strategy-game players. What feels interesting, confusing, or missing?

ATHELING

Would you have won in 1066?

Would you have won in 1066?