Warsim: The Realm of Aslona

There is a moment, roughly ninety minutes into a first game of Warsim, when the thing finally clicks. The number keys have been mashing through nested menus, half the systems ignored because they aren’t understood, the treasury bleeding out. Then a goblin diplomat shows up in the throne room offering a trade deal, the spymaster reports a bandit lord near a village that had been forgotten, and a bard performs a song — procedurally written, specifically for the current reign — about a beggar’s execution. Suddenly it isn’t menu navigation. It’s running a kingdom.

Warsim: The Realm of Aslona is a text-based kingdom management and strategy sim rendered entirely in ASCII art, built solo by Huw Millward, who released it on Steam on December 20, 2022 after years of development. Millward’s update cadence across that span is remarkable for a solo project — patch notes that read like changelogs from a team of ten, shipped by one person with no art budget and, apparently, no exit strategy.

The setup is simple. Aslona’s throne is fractured. The player inherits it. What happens next is almost entirely unconstrained: reform the realm, tax it into revolt, buy mercenaries and conquer neighbors, or spend the whole run running a gladiatorial arena and betting on scorpion fights. The market positioning is unusual because there isn’t really a market position. It doesn’t compete with Crusader Kings; it competes with a player’s tolerance for a monochrome interface. Its closest relatives are Dwarf Fortress and the old text-sim tradition — games that treat presentation as a rounding error and pour every hour of development into systems.

• The Throne Room: Over a thousand distinct visitor events form the game’s beating heart. Petitioners, assassins, merchants, madmen, foreign envoys — each demands a ruling, and rulings compound into a reputation that neighboring realms actually respond to.
• Procedural Generation at Absurd Scale: The engine spins up tens of millions of unique fantasy races, each with its own traits, unit types, laws and internal politics, plus effectively limitless character faces, names, bloodlines, heraldic banners, and bard songs written about a specific reign.
• A Full Strategy Layer: Treasury and taxation, army recruitment, mercenary contracts, spy networks, diplomacy, and open war — the governance systems are genuinely interlocking, not window dressing on an event deck.
• The Sideshow Economy: Gladiatorial arenas to own and operate, a monster pit for capturing and training creatures, taverns, festivals, dungeons, hidden locations, and embedded minigames including dice, snail racing and scorpion fighting.
• Total Run Variance: Every new game reshuffles the map, the factions, and the races that populate them. No two kingdoms are alike, and that’s not marketing copy — it’s the architecture.

The Gameplay Loop

Warsim runs on a turn-based rhythm that is almost embarrassingly readable once seen: hold court, manage the books, act on the map, end turn. The throne room is where the personality lives. The treasury screen is where the consequences land. The map is where ambition either pays off or collapses.

What makes the loop work is friction between systems that were clearly designed to argue with each other. Raising taxes funds the army but sours the populace, which changes what walks into the throne room, which changes diplomatic standing, which changes whether the orc kingdom on the border wants a trade pact or a head. Hiring mercenaries is fast, expensive, and disloyal. Building a standing army is slow, cheap over time, and politically dangerous. None of these are novel strategy concepts in isolation. What’s novel is the density — the sheer number of levers wired to other levers, in a game that renders itself in dashes and pipes.

The individual systems, taken alone, are not deep. This is the fairest criticism of Warsim, and it bears repeating plainly: the arena is a light betting minigame. The spy network is a probability roll with flavor text. The dungeon exploration is a menu with outcomes. Isolate any one subsystem and evaluate it as a standalone game, and it’s thin. Depth here is emergent, not local. It comes from having forty thin systems that all touch each other, generating situations no designer explicitly wrote. That’s a legitimate design philosophy — it’s the same one that makes Dwarf Fortress work — but buyers should know which kind of depth they’re buying.

Onboarding Is the Real Boss Fight

Warsim’s hardest content is its first two hours, and not by design. There’s minimal tutorialization. The menu tree sprawls in every direction, options are numbered rather than named in any hierarchy that can be internalized quickly, and the game rarely explains why a number moved. A first kingdom will likely fall to systems the player didn’t know existed. Some find that thrilling. Many bounce, and they aren’t wrong to.

This is the most fixable problem in the game. Opacity is not the same thing as difficulty. A screen explaining what “kingdom stability” actually reacts to would cost nothing in atmosphere and would likely convert a meaningful chunk of the people who refund early. The community wiki and a handful of YouTube primers currently do the work the game should be doing itself. Millward has shipped an extraordinary volume of content over the years; a fraction of that effort aimed at the first session would raise this score.

The Mid-Game Plateau

Once a kingdom stabilizes — treasury healthy, borders quiet, army fed — Warsim can flatten out. The throne-room events keep rotating, but the strategic tension that made the early game frantic dissolves into administration. The counter-play is to invent a self-imposed objective: conquer everything, build the perfect arena, hunt down every hidden location, chase the weirdest race the generator can produce. That works, but it requires the player to supply their own ambition. The game will not escalate to meet the way a tightly authored campaign would. Randomness also swings hard in both directions — a bad early roll on neighbors can end a run before it’s had a fair shot, which stings more in a game with no rewind.

The Humor

Warsim is funny, in a dark, deadpan, faintly deranged register. The absurdist tone does real mechanical work: it makes reading walls of text pleasurable, and it makes procedural generation forgivable. When the generator produces a race of hyper-religious lizard pacifists with a national obsession with cheese, that’s not a bug in the fiction — it is the fiction. Few procedural systems earn that much goodwill from their own weirdness.

Let’s be honest about what’s on screen: an ASCII interface in a console-style window, colored text, box-drawing characters, and faces built from punctuation marks. It is not stylized retro. It is not a lo-fi aesthetic choice made by an art director. It’s what a solo developer with no artist and infinite ideas builds, and the game is completely unapologetic about it.

The strange thing is how much it works. The procedural face generator, in particular, is a small marvel — assembling recognizable, weirdly expressive portraits from a handful of glyphs. Banners and heraldry get the same treatment and land better than they have any right to. Character comes through.

The interface design is another matter, and here form and function are both losing. Navigation is number-key-driven through deeply nested menus with inconsistent depth and no persistent breadcrumb. Getting lost is easy; backing out of four screens to find the one wanted is a routine occurrence by design of the layout. Readability is the specific casualty — dense text blocks, limited visual hierarchy, and important state changes reported in the same font weight and color as flavor text. Anything approaching a modern information design pass — grouping, consistent key placement, a status bar that never leaves the screen — would be transformative without touching a single mechanic.

Performance demands are, by design, minimal. It’s a text application: a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, with negligible memory footprint and no reason for input lag, even while generating millions of entities behind the scenes. Against today’s bloated installs, there’s something bracing about a game this computationally honest.

Warsim is a Steam title and a Windows-native executable, and the mouse is nearly vestigial here — this is a keyboard-first game, driven by number keys and Enter. The design rewards that choice: once the common paths are learned, turns can be ripped through without ever leaving the number row, faster than GUI strategy games typically allow.

That keyboard dependency shapes everything downstream. On a desktop or laptop it’s ideal. On a Steam Deck or handheld, it’s awkward — a number-pad-driven interface routed through a controller or on-screen keyboard, and text this dense is punishing on a small display regardless. Play it on a real screen with a real keyboard.

Steam’s value-adds are minimal by nature. There’s no meaningful controller support to speak of, and cloud saves and overlay behavior are the sort of thing worth verifying against a given setup. The store’s screenshot gallery — just three images — does the game no favors; those screenshots do more to suppress sales than the price does to drive them. Millward also maintains an itch.io presence, which is worth a look for anyone wanting to sample the shape of the thing before committing.

Warsim makes a strong case that presentation and substance are separable, and that most games have the ratio backwards. Huw Millward spent years building systems instead of shaders, and the result is a kingdom sim with more mechanical surface area than titles built by studios a hundred times his size. The throne room alone — a thousand-plus authored encounters wired into a live simulation — represents more writing and design labor than most indie games contain in total.

It is also, without question, hard to love at first sight. The interface is a barricade. The tutorial is a rumor. A first run will be confusing and a second only slightly less so, and the game will do very little to help. That’s a real cost, and it’s why this lands at Good rather than higher: the flaws matter, and they fall on exactly the players who would benefit most from what the game does well.

For those who push through, the reward is a game that keeps rewarding curiosity for a very long time and asks for pocket change in return. Buy it, watch a twenty-minute primer, and give it three hours before judging. The ugliest game on a Steam library page may well outlast most of the pretty ones.