The hottest city builder in Steam Next Fest is actually a roguelike deck builder in disguise: "Break the game with thousands of insane builds"

This Steam Next Fest has yielded a bumper crop of kingdom-style city builders. The King is Watching caught my eye initially, and now 9 Kings has emerged as the top-ranking city builder of the event. The thing is, 9 Kings is as much a roguelike deckbuilder as it is a kingdom builder, as developer Sad Socket explains.

The demo for 9 Kings has seemingly been around for a bit, but the updated one is featured in Next Fest and most of its "very positive" reviews were posted recently. The game is billed as a mix of grid-based building where you turn "your city into the most powerful of all kingdoms," and card-based strategy where you craft a deck of perks, actions, units, items, and upgrades. It's all rendered in lovely pixel art and seems like the kind of hard-to-put-down snack game that could quietly devour an evening.

The grid is deceptively small: just 9 tiles to begin with, but with room to expand. Aggressive cards might destroy a plot of land to buff the adjacent ones, or cause a soldier defending your kingdom to explode on death and damage would-be invaders. Your deck reflects your chosen king, which are almost like classes, and difficulty settings spice things up further. Other cards may replenish a platoon, unlock a new unit like a sniper, or deploy defensive buildings. It feels like a mix of politics, infrastructure, and war – anything goes as you compete with other kings.

Some seriously weird stuff starts to happen when you get into royal decrees, which seem to add passive bonuses or instantly dish out gifts like extra gold. You can summon defeated enemies to your army, reduce the cost of certain cards, or embrace the cultist life. Hey, sometimes it takes extreme measures to fight inflation.

"Find ways to break the game and become overpowered," the devs advise. "Grow your kingdom in strategic ways, prepare for dozens of unique events, and show the world your kingdom can last longer than any other."

9 Kings is scheduled to launch in April.

Someone combined Diablo and League of Legends for a roguelike co-op MOBA with Risk of Rain energy, and it deserves the hype it's getting in Steam Next Fest.