Causing a stink in a turn-based strategy with medieval roots

Developer Yaza Games

Publisher Daedalic Entertainment

Format PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Origin Poland

Release 2022

Once you enter the world of medieval marginalia, it’s hard not to fall for its puerile, violent charms. Sketched around the fringes of old scholarly parchments is a whole fantasy kingdom that subverts reality, where rabbits run amok with swords, oversized snails swallow men whole, and trumpeters bend double to parp a tune from their bare behinds. For Polish developer Yaza Games, this feudal humour was ideal material for some anarchic turn-based strategy. Its philosophy is simple: if there’s anything as timeless as a tactical war game, it’s a good fart gag.

As game director Wojtek Janas tells it, the pictures drove the project from the start, when they and their university course mates found themselves in need of a game development project. The group’s art director introduced them to medieval marginalia, and it was love at first sight. “We were like, ‘Wow, they look so cool – we have to get it animated,’” Janas says. And once they’d dived into this bizarre alternate reality, the choice of genre for their game was obvious. “There was a picture of a rabbit fighting an army of dogs, and we thought it looked like a Worms-like game,” Janas says, “so we decided it should be turn-based fighting.”