The Guild 1 Remake: the game that taught me to optimise, and ruined every game since

I know exactly which game damaged me, and it is this one.

Before Europa 1400 I played normally. Afterwards I spent twenty-five years recalculating production chains in survival games, redrawing entire districts in city builders because one road was badly placed, and restarting Paradox campaigns because I had mis-allocated development points on turn four.

It was not the wish to win. It was the need for the machine to run smoothly. And I caught it in a medieval blacksmith's workshop.

Why this game drives you mad

Most management games ask you to grow a number. The Guild asks you to keep a family alive in a town where everybody has their own interests.

You begin at the head of a fledgling dynasty with a modest business. You choose a profession, blacksmith, alchemist, tailor and the rest, and you grow your enterprise.

So far, a crafting game. Except that trade alone gives you no voice in the town hall, and that is where the game becomes something else.

To make the law favour you, you have to enter politics. Popularity, bribes, blackmail. You climb the social ladder, you aim for high office, and you find yourself steering the city's decisions to protect your own business.

And on top of that sits succession. Years pass, your character ages, and you have to secure the line so the legacy endures. You are not playing a run, you are playing a family across generations.

That layering is what creates the obsession. Optimising a workshop is a solvable problem. Optimising a workshop whose profitability depends on a law voted by people you must corrupt before they die of old age is a problem that never closes.

The low road, which is the best one

The other career deserves mentioning, because that is where the game shows its black humour.

You can decide not to earn honestly. Send your thugs to waylay carts, scout buildings for valuables, pick pockets, and even kidnap people for ransom.

Or the opposite: you can choose to uphold the law, which is an elegant way of saying you will mostly be protecting your own interests.

The game never moralises. It gives you tools, rivals, and a town that has no opinion about your methods as long as you are not caught.

What this remake is worth

Be precise, because the object is a particular one.

This is not The Guild 3, the third entry that spent years looking for itself. It is a remake of the first, Europa 1400, the one that defined the formula, made by Ashborne Games and published by THQ Nordic.

It launches today in early access, with no reviews and no price displayed as I write. It is single-player only, which will disappoint anybody hoping for the multiplayer of later entries.

My reservations are the ones you should have in front of any cult series returning.

The series has a difficult history. Every entry since the first divided opinion, often for the same reason: fascinating systems on paper, execution stumbling on AI and legibility. Early access guarantees nothing, it opens a worksite.

And a faithful remake inherits the original's flaws. Europa 1400 was already dense, sometimes opaque, and left the player to discover essential mechanics alone. Modernising that takes more than redoing the textures.

What I hope is that they understood what made the first one so toxic and so good: it is not the economic simulation, it is that your shop depends on people who cannot themselves be optimised.

We have written a full guide to getting started, because this series has never been able to explain its own rules.

Do you also restart a save because a road is badly placed? We support each other on the InsertCoins Discord.