Manor Lords reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, in the best way

I should have been enjoying the beach. I was on vacation, far from my gaming PC, and close to soothing, rolling waves. But instead, my mind kept drifting to a landlocked chunk of 14th century Germany. Few games have wormed their way into my brain like Manor Lords.

The medieval “city builder with battles,” as the developer Slavic Magic describes it, is intricate and challenging, with lots of moving pieces and interdependencies. It’s also, at times, immensely frustrating. There’s a satisfaction to that, like a multi-step puzzle box — you suss out countless tiny solutions until they all build up to the satisfying click that finally opens the lid.

But I think what’s gotten to me most about Manor Lords is not the complexity, the attention to detail, or even that satisfaction you get from planning out a city and watching it thrive. I think it’s Greg.

A guy named Greg

Manor Lords is a passion project. Greg Styczeń, who goes by Slavic Magic, has been working on its design for seven years. And there’s something funny about the entire dev team behind a successful game consisting of just this one dude named Greg.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse

But it’s not that you see Greg’s hand in every pixel — there are no in-jokes or easter eggs, and even the graphics are based on historically accurate scans rather than showing some individual style. Instead, the passion part of the project can be found in how the game works.

Manor Lords’ villages and towns bustle. There’s always activity. People and livestock cart goods between buildings, structures get built from the ground up while you watch the progress, vendors call from the marketplace, and farmland gets plowed, sowed, and reaped depending on the season. And you can just watch it all happen, either zoomed out and watching from above like some, well, lord, or zoomed way down to ground level, following the folks (or sheep) around on their daily tasks.

And Greg did all that.

Two brothers and some hapless dwarves

Stardew Valley has a similar story — developed by a single person over four years, it has gone on to sell more than 30 million copies. So does Undertale. And even Minecraft. And a game called Dwarf Fortress.

I’d been aware of Dwarf Fortress for a while and even tried (and failed) to play it a couple of times over the years. Then, in 2022, I caught COVID-19 and it knocked me on my ass. With a couple months of downtime, I finally decided I was going to figure it out.

Image: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox Games

And I fell in love with that ridiculous, ASCII-graphicked, supercharged spreadsheet of a game. It was still baffling and user-unfriendly, but it slowly started to make sense. Well, most of it did — I still don’t really understand armies (and I even wrote a whole guide about them).

Dwarf Fortress is another passion project made by a single-digit dev team. That number being two — brothers Tarn and Zach Adams. Dwarf Fortress has been in development since 2006 and is still technically in alpha, even as of version 50.12. And it projects that same sense of singular vision and the kind of attention to detail you only get from someone who really cares about what they’re creating.

Dwarf Fortress — and, by extension, the brothers Adams — survived solely on voluntary donations for almost 20 years. The base game with its ASCII interface is still free, even as the updated, graphical version sells on Steam and itch.io. When it launched on Steam in 2022, Dwarf Fortress was that day’s best-seller, with 160,000 people picking it up. By the end of its first year, copies sold hit 800,000.

For the first few years, Slavic Magic’s development on Manor Lords followed the Adams’ approach. Development was supported by a Patreon, well before the demos or trailers ever came out. The in-development videos Slavic Magic shared showed the detail and obsessive care being poured into the game. And people noticed.

In the weeks leading up to Manor Lords’ early access launch, it became the most anticipated game ever on Steam, with over 3 million people wishlisting it. About a week out, it has sold well over 1 million copies and, over the first weekend, it set the record for the most concurrent players for any city sim game.

Lording over it all

There’s this thing that happens in every game of Manor Lords I’ve played. I build my cozy town where everyone is fed, clothed, warm, and happy. I might even fend off some bandits from time to time. But when I try to expand into a neighboring region, I realize I haven’t actually built myself the titular manor. It just doesn’t come up for me — admittedly, I tend to focus on the city-building parts rather than all-out warfare. That it keeps happening makes me think there’s something about my brain that just rejects feudalism (weird brag).

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse via Polygon

Manor Lords is set in a roughly historically accurate 14th century, and that means it’s somewhere between a pre- and a proto-capitalist society. Even Manor Lords’ marketplaces don’t involve money — not that you see in-game, at least. Instead, they’re just the place where goods are distributed to the families that need them. It’s downright collectivist when you think about it.

That breaks down between Manor Lords’ regions, though. Trading takes wealth — nice houses and surplus goods. Even if you control two regions, you’ll still need a fully functional town in each because they don’t share their goods freely. I, as the lord of the manor(s), don’t get to just cajole my two towns into some sort of utilitarian redistribution of yarn — it’s more of a barter system that works best when each town specializes in something the other doesn’t have (yarn in exchange for firewood, for example).

And that’s on me — the villagers in Manor Lords already know what they’re looking for. I can’t decide for them that they’re all just going to make firewood from now on and trust that the next town over will send them enough vegetables to survive the winter in exchange. It’s an interesting friction between me and the game, actually. I learned the foundation — building a town — but, in trying to put my knowledge into broader practice, I’ve discovered new gaps and things I didn’t quite get right. These frustrations are where the game — Greg — corrects me, and tells me more about the world.

Dwarf Fortress is all about finding those gaps in your knowledge. Sure, strongholds will fall if you run out of food, but they’ll fail equally dramatically if, say, your brewer’s pet duck gets stuck in a tree for so long that he becomes despondent and stops working and then all the other dwarves go insane from lack of booze.

The (un)official motto of Dwarf Fortress is “losing is fun!” For that game, it’s because it’s fun to see how one small mistake snowballs into full societal collapse. For any other game, it’s just as true, though. My failures and mistakes are a way for a game to say, “You’ve almost got it, but how it actually works is…” I might not always learn the lesson the first (or third) time, but I’ll eventually come out of it with a better understanding of the world and the story the game is telling.

Bespoke fun

The success of Manor Lords and the other passion project games like it speaks to an audience seeking out what they want and need from a game while passing up more readily accessible and advertised games.

At the same time, and more generally, there’s been a shift away from aggregation and toward curation. You can see it in sites like Substack (Nazis aside) and the (re)rise of newsletters — places where the information we consume is filtered through a singular voice, rather than flattened and disseminated en masse. (Hey, unrelated, did you know Polygon has a newsletter?)

And you can see it in these games — games that are deeply themselves with their own, well-developed voice, whether that means they’re focused on historical accuracy, smooching farmers, or dwarven strongholds collapsing in tragic and hilarious ways. These games find a broad audience, not because they’re so anodyne as to be acceptable to anyone, but because they’re so patiently and painstakingly crafted and, frankly, nerdy that you can’t help but appreciate them.

I keep coming back to Manor Lords not because it’s some perfect game, but because playing it feels like a deep conversation about someone’s pet interest. It’s because this is Greg’s game. Or Tarn’s game. Or Eric’s game. They didn’t make these passion projects for me — or for anyone, really — they made them for themselves. And that’s precisely what makes them so fascinating.