Planned Release Date: Sep 14, 2026

About This Demo

This is the demo for Crownfront, a turn-based strategy game played on a board that sits on the floor of a room. Your castle, farms and army are pieces on that board, so are the enemy's, and you can see the whole thing from one end to the other.

It's built like a classic RTS (gather, build, expand, attack) except it runs in turns. Nobody wins for clicking faster. You take as long as you want on each move.

What's in the demo

One map, you against one AI kingdom. Two resources, wood and food. Three buildings: the Castle, which stores everything and is the only place new workers come from, the Farm, which produces food once it's finished, and the Barracks, which trains soldiers and archers. Soldiers hold the front line and archers hit from range. Which ones you can train depends on how far along your kingdom is. The early ones are cheap and weak, the later ones cost more and are a lot tougher. The castle costs a lot to build and can be upgraded, but only one castle can be.

You can put up to 30 units in a group and move them as one.

Food

Every unit you own eats every turn, workers included. Farms take several turns to build and don't produce anything until they're done. So if you train an army before your farms can feed it, the army takes damage and units start dying. If you sit back and farm until you feel safe, the enemy turns up with more soldiers than you have. Most matches come down to how well you handle that.

How it ends

Destroy the enemy castle. There's no other win condition. A match takes about half an hour.

What the full game adds

The Early Access version is the same game with a lot more in it: three maps including two four player maps, stone and iron on top of wood and food, a Blacksmith, Workshop and University, four kingdom-wide upgrades, catapults, two more unit types, fog of war, a day and night cycle, weather, and saving in the middle of a match. The full list is on the main Crownfront store page. If you enjoy the demo, wishlisting the full game helps me more than anything else.

Feedback

I'm one person making this, and the demo is out so I can see how people actually play it. If something feels wrong or unfair, tell me on the discussion boards or the Crownfront Discord. The balance and the AI are going to be shaped by what people report.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Cartoonish violence when units attack each other such as basic animations and sound effects.