Here’s a genre that I recognize. King of the Dwarves is a dungeon builder, a la Dungeon Keeper and the Dungeons series.

The goal here is to dig out a home for the dwarves, cube by cube. The demo starts out by providing a lot of the amenities I would expect that I’d otherwise have to provide for myself: beer, sleeping quarters, a tool shed, and warehouse space. From there, the tutorial tells me what to build.

I had to create a research area and then assign some dwarves to think about things. This generated knowledge points which I could use to unlock items in the knowledge tree.

As I unlocked various branches, I could build more things such as the water pump which is essential for creating ale.

The game continues like this ad infinitum. It’s got all of the typical builder tropes such as the individual resource trackers along the top of the screen, job assignments, recruiting, and labor management. It also allows for the building vertically. By holding CTRL + Mouse Wheel, I could scroll up and down through the strata, but despite having built a ladder as instructed, I couldn’t seem to get the dwarves to use it to head to the next level down to start working.

This game is a Known Quantity, so I spent a lot more time with it than I felt I should have. It was fun the same way all of the other similar games I already own are fun, but the dwarves here were kind of dumb and didn’t always go to where they were needed; most of them stupidly congregated at the dead-end of a hallway when I wanted them somewhere else, so looks like this game needs more time to incubate before it’s ready for release. Still, I always welcome more dungeon builders and I think this title should have a lot to recommend it, assuming the dwarves wise up and get to work.