Thronefall

Thronefall isn’t interested in wasting your time.

This stripped-down strategy gem from Grizzly Games hands you a sword, a crown, and a few gold coins, then dares you to survive the night. There are no bloated menus, no 40-minute build orders, and no need for a six-part YouTube tutorial to figure out why your wheat farms aren’t producing. Instead, it trims the RTS fat, tosses in some light hack-and-slash action, and delivers what might be the purest hit of strategy dopamine you’ll find in years.

Each day, you build your little kingdom, houses for gold, walls for protection, barracks for muscle. At night, the monsters come, and you ride out like a monarch with a mortgage. Do you stack your coins into towers with long-range archers, or upgrade your explosive farmland and pray it works? The decision space is small but deceptively deep. The game feeds you exactly the information you need, enemy types, spawn locations, wave strength, then challenges you to adapt without ever breaking its clean, legible design.

And when the sun rises over your battered but surviving kingdom? Chef’s kiss.

Thronefall is beautiful in motion: clean UI, crisp silhouettes, and a color palette that makes units pop like toy soldiers on a diorama battlefield. There’s even an endless mode that turns it into a roguelite, complete with perks, mutators, and randomized loadouts for when you want the pain, but prettier.

It’s the kind of game where five minutes becomes five hours. Or five hours becomes a perfect run. RTS veterans will find its elegance refreshing. Newcomers will find a kingdom worth defending.

All hail the bite-sized king of strategy.