Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind

Nineteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. King of Dragon Pass shipped in 1999, sold modestly, and then did something almost no strategy game of its era managed: it refused to die. It got ported to iOS in 2011 and found a second life among people who had never touched a Bronze Age fantasy tribe simulator and suddenly could not stop thinking about one. Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind is A Sharp’s answer to that cult, and it is not a remake, a remaster, or a nostalgia cash-in. It’s a prequel set thousands of years earlier in the same world — Greg Stafford’s Glorantha — with new gods, new tribes, and a genuinely new design.

You play a clan of the Riders, horse people who have fled their homeland and are now trying to build something permanent in territory that does not want them. The framing matters. Where King of Dragon Pass handed you a valley and asked you to become king of it, Six Ages hands you a refugee crisis and asks you to survive the century. That’s a colder, more interesting premise, and the game’s systems are tuned to it.

Commercially, this sits in an odd and honorable niche. It launched on iOS first — a strategic choice that tells you exactly which audience A Sharp trusted — and arrived on Steam after. Critics were emphatic: an 87 on Metacritic, and a 4.8 out of 5 from 771 iOS ratings. That warmth, set against a design this demanding, is the whole story of this game, and we’ll get to why.

• A 400-scene story engine: Each season surfaces illustrated, branching narrative encounters drawn from a pool of over 400. They’re not flavor text bolted onto a spreadsheet. They are the game’s primary interface with its own simulation, and the prose is legitimately good — dry, mythic, occasionally very funny.
• The clan ring: Seven advisors, each devoted to a different god with a different temperament, debate every major decision in front of you. Critically, they are fallible. Your war leader will confidently recommend a raid that gets your best warriors killed. Learning which advisor to trust about what is the actual skill curve.
• Deep seasonal management: Farm, herd, hunt, trade, raid, or sacrifice — you allocate people and magic every season, and the consequences compound across generations. Weather, morale, cattle counts, and divine favor all feed each other.
• Exploration and heroquesting: A map roughly four times the size of King of Dragon Pass‘s, seeded with spirits you can find, bargain with, and bind, plus mythic heroquests where you re-enact the deeds of gods and bring their power back into the world.
• Scalable difficulty, including permadeath: From forgiving down to Iron Willed, where a bad decade ends the run for good.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is simple on the surface. A season passes. You assign your clan to tasks. Story scenes fire. You choose. Repeat.

What makes it work is that the two halves are load-bearing on each other. The management layer isn’t a minigame between story beats, and the story isn’t decoration on a resource sim. Send too many warriors on patrol and your herds go untended, so a bad winter kills cattle, so morale drops, so the scene that fires next season is about a family quietly leaving your clan for a richer neighbor. That chain is legible in retrospect and almost never predictable in advance. The game is a machine for generating consequences you deserve but did not foresee.

The clan ring is the design’s standout idea. Most strategy games with advisors use them as tooltips wearing hats — the UI telling you the correct answer in a funny voice. A Sharp went the other way. Your ring members have gods, grudges, and blind spots. The Elmal-worshipper counsels loyalty and defense past the point of self-harm. The trader wants to negotiate with people who are visibly planning to murder you. When five of seven agree, you should still ask why, because sometimes the consensus is a shared cultural blind spot rather than wisdom. Very few games have modeled institutional groupthink this elegantly, and fewer still have made it fun.

Heroquesting is where the game reaches highest. You step out of ordinary time into myth, retracing a god’s journey, and the quest expects you to know the story. Choose the way your god chose and you return with real, permanent power. Improvise and you may get something stranger, or lose the questor entirely. It’s a knowledge check disguised as a ritual, and completing one correctly is one of the great “I actually understood this world” moments the genre can offer.

Where It Bites

Now the complaints, because they’re real and they temper the recommendation.

The randomness has teeth. You can play a season correctly — right allocations, right diplomacy, right sacrifices — and still get gutted by a raid, a plague, or a divine snub. Defenders call this Gloranthan verisimilitude; the Bronze Age was not a meritocracy. They’re not wrong. But there’s a difference between a game where luck adds texture and one where a 40-year careful campaign can be undone by two bad rolls, and Six Ages lands closer to the second than most players expect going in.

The feedback is opaque. This is the more serious design flaw. When an outcome goes badly, the game frequently declines to explain why. Did the raid fail because your magic was low, because the target’s god was ascendant that season, because your war leader was secretly incompetent, or because you’d insulted a spirit forty turns ago? The game knows. It won’t say. For a title that asks you to reason across decades, withholding the causal chain converts strategy into superstition. You end up cargo-culting: doing what worked last time and hoping.

The onboarding is brutal. Your first clan will die. Probably your second. There’s no tutorial in the modern sense, and the systems only click somewhere around the third run, when the logic finally lands: cattle are currency, magic is a budget, and your neighbors’ opinion of you is a slow-moving asset you should have been investing in since year one. The generous difficulty settings help, and the fact that they exist at all shows A Sharp learned something from twenty years of watching people bounce off King of Dragon Pass. But the learning curve is a wall with handholds, not a ramp.

And it ends too early. The campaign wraps in under 30 in-game years, which is a strange decision for a game whose entire pitch is generational consequence. You spend the first third learning, the second third building, and then it’s over roughly when your clan is finally interesting. Multiple runs are clearly the intent — randomized clan traits and event seeds make playthroughs diverge sharply — but the ending still reads as a chapter break rather than a conclusion. Which, given the sequel that followed, is precisely what it was.

The hand-painted art is the reason this game gets remembered. Every scene is illustrated in a style that’s part illuminated manuscript, part 1970s fantasy paperback — flat, bold, unashamed of its own strangeness. It looks nothing like the sub-Tolkien default that swallowed fantasy games whole, and that’s a deliberate act of taste. Glorantha is an alien setting, and the art commits to it.

The UI is functional and dense — a lot of numbers in a lot of small boxes — and it hasn’t been prettied up much since 1999. That’s mostly fine; this is an information game and information wants to be visible. Where it stumbles is in the same place the design does: the interface shows you state but not causality. A “why did this happen” log would transform the experience, and its absence is felt every single run.

Performance is a non-issue by design. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, which is not faint praise — it means the game should remain playable long after more demanding titles have aged out, and for a title this durable that actually matters.

iOS is arguably the definitive version, and the 4.8/5 rating across 771 ratings reflects that. The game is fundamentally a book you touch: read a scene, tap a choice, adjust some sliders. That maps onto a tablet perfectly. Portrait reading, direct manipulation, no cursor between you and the text. On an iPad the interactive-fiction half of the design sings. On an iPhone the density gets cramped — the management screens want more real estate than a phone gives them — but it’s workable for a commute.

Steam gives you a bigger canvas, sharper text at high resolutions, and the practical advantage of a full-size desktop screen. Mouse input is precise for allocation-tuning. What you lose is intimacy; the game plays like a strategy title on desktop and like a storybook on tablet, and the storybook framing is the one A Sharp designed for. Cross-save is not part of the deal, so pick a home and stay there.

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind is a small studio’s uncompromising second attempt at an idea nobody else has ever seriously tried. It succeeds at the hard part — making a resource simulation feel like a story about people you’re responsible for — and stumbles on the parts most developers would have solved first: teaching, explaining, and knowing when to end.

The reservations are honest. Some players will find the opacity and the randomness intolerable, and they have a case. But those with patience are getting something with no real substitute on the market. Nineteen years of waiting produced a game that improves on its predecessor in nearly every dimension and still leaves you wanting the next one. A Sharp should be embarrassed by exactly one thing here: making a game about consequences echoing for decades, and then cutting it off after three.

Buy it on an iPad. Expect to lose your first two clans. Then it starts.