Nepos Games are the two-person studio behind Nebuchadnezzar, which Nate Crowley called “two thirds of an outstanding historical city builder”. They’ve just informed me they’re making a new building sim called County Of Fortune, out in Q4 2025. It ain’t a city builder, though. In fact, it claims to have murdered the city builder in cold blood, which is unfortunate, because I was really looking forward to a round of Manor Lords later.
“The city-builder is dead, long live the county-builder,” declares the press release, brandishing the husk of SimCity over its head. OK, I’ll bite – what’s a county-builder then? Well, it’s sort of several city-builders having an argument. In County Of Fortune, you seed and grow a number of settlements side by side, then manage their economic and social relations. In other words, it’s a game that appears to simulate the phenomenon of culture clash. I’m not sure all this amounts to the wholesale death of a genre, but it’s certainly intriguing. Here’s the Steam page, and here’s a trailer.
“In County of Fortune, you’re not just managing a single city, but an entire county,” the press release continues. “The game focuses on the bigger picture: managing multiple settlements and their development, overseeing logistics, and making sure resources flow effectively across your region without worrying about individual buildings.
“Furthermore, as your county expands, unique cultural traits will emerge, based on the characteristics you cultivate in each settlement,” it continues. “These traits influence how your communities develop, making each region or even village in the county unique. And it also brings interesting interactions between settlements and even between their leaders.”
My thoroughly piqued interest is heightened by the discovery that the game is set in (procedurally generated) England, made up of towns like Winchelsea and Chipping Campden that sound like they’ve been AI hallucinated based on episodes of I’m Alan Partridge, but then you fire up the Googlebox and my word, there is such a place as Chipping Campden. No, there really is! It’s in Gloucestershire.
If you’re from Chipping Campden, don’t get chippy – I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Gloucestershire, home of the Witcombe Music Festival. It’s not like you’re from Cheshire. The only things I know about Cheshire are that it consists of cheese and cats and is on the other side of stinking, sewage-drinking Manchester. And don’t get me started about Cumberland. They share a border with my own county of birth, North Yorkshire, and we have never forgiven them for allying with the Picts in, er, I think it was 300 AD.
As all this hopefully indicates, I can see how a game based around understanding and manipulating the relationships between villages and counties could be entertaining, perhaps even radical. The builder/management genre is vast, mind you, and it’s likely something similar has been attempted before.
I am hungry for specifics. What kinds of social organisation or leadership style will the game support? How extreme will the disparities be – could we end up in a situation reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, with villages of anarchists and capitalists treating each other like alien planets? Is warfare a feature?
The press release will not say. It merely concludes that “we believe County of Fortune will resonate with players looking for something new in the genre – a deep, adaptive experience that challenges them to plan across the entire map, rather than focusing on individual cities.” Fine, keep your secrets. But please, enough killing of genres. That’s the kind of thing they get up to in Cheshire, when they’re not making cats out of cheese.