County of Fortune: the city builder that asks you to zoom out

There is a moment in roughly every medieval city builder when you realise you have spent two hours deciding where to put the bakery.

County of Fortune starts from the opposite gesture. The camera does not drop into the street, it climbs. You are not drawing a town: you are placing whole villages across a region, and each one fills itself in, street by street, according to what is in the ground.

Lokator, a job nobody had let us play

The game hands you an odd and very specific title: lokator. In the Middle Ages that was the man a lord charged with settling an empty stretch of land. He chose the sites, recruited the settlers, laid out the plots, and took his cut.

In practice you are given a bare patch of kingdom and you decide where everything goes. Siting is everything: deposits, biomes, elevation and climate decide what the soil can produce, and navigable rivers turn geography into logistics. A badly placed hamlet stays a hamlet.

After a while a second game starts on top of the first. Villages get named mayors, rival noble houses weave politics across the region, and migrating cultures arrive: a blessing for some villages, a complication for others.

The names do half the work

What caught me watching the demo run were the labels. Bibury, Branscombe, Cold Aston, Kimbolton, Burford: entirely plausible English village names, dropped onto a generated map.

And under each name, the list of buildings, which is a small lesson in medieval economics. Cabbage farm, wool tunic workshop, fishery, raft port, cheesery, carpenters' guild, brickmaker, butter workshop, verjuice workshop. Verjuice. There is an astrolabe workshop in the clay, metal and glass production chain.

That level of detail is the same one that ran through Nebuchadnezzar, the studio's previous game, a Mesopotamian city builder in the Pharaoh and Caesar lineage. Nepos Games is two people in Prague, a graphic designer and a programmer, who met at SCS Software working on Euro Truck Simulator 2. That explains a great deal about their relationship with maps and roads.

Trade is the other game

The screen that sells it is the trade view. Regions with storybook names (Darkwood, Linden Meadows, Rapid-Stream Lands, Ore Hills, Silver Margraviate) linked by import and export lines, and a goods list running from grain to painted cabinets by way of leather surcoats, musical instruments and tempera paint.

You can see exactly the game it promises: a county that lives not off its towns taken one at a time, but off what they trade between them.

Which leaves the one thing a demo never tells you, and which will decide everything: whether this county has any difficulty. A builder at this scale can slide very fast into a contemplative sandbox where nothing ever threatens anything. The rival noble houses are meant to answer that. We find out tonight.

County of Fortune launches today, 5 November, on PC, published by Aquila Interactive. A demo is available on its Steam page. The review will follow once we have run a county into its third generation.

If you are the sort who finished Nebuchadnezzar, come and say what you want from this one on the InsertCoins Discord: we will compare counties.