About
Merchant Kings of Africa is a slow, persistent strategy game about running a trading kingdom. It is made by one person, and it runs in your browser.
The game
You take a kingdom from a single tile on a fogged map through five ages of building, research, trade, diplomacy and war, alongside up to ninety-nine other human kingdoms in the same world. The setting is the trading empires of historical Africa, and the buildings look like the age and the place that built them: thatch and timber, then mudbrick, then mortarless granite, then plaster and minaret, then gilded stone.
What makes it different from most kingdom-builders is that labour is the scarce thing. Nothing gets made unless somebody is standing there making it, so every building you raise is a decision about who is not farming. Trade matters because your land only allows some of what your people want, and the rest has to come by caravan — on routes that can be interdicted, taxed, or protected by treaty.
A world runs on its own clock whether you are logged in or not. Most turns take a minute. Coming back the next morning to see what your caravans did is the intended way to play.
Who makes it
One developer, writing the engine, the art pipeline, the servers and these pages. There is no studio and no team. That is why the devlog is written in the first person, why bugs are described honestly as still open, and why replies to messages sometimes take a day or two.
The rules change as the game is developed. Every change ships as a new numbered ruleset, and a world keeps the ruleset it was born with for its whole life, so nothing changes under you mid-game. The devlog records what each ruleset changed and why, and every guide says which ruleset it was written for.
How it is paid for
The game is free to play. The servers cost money, and the plan for covering that is advertising: on this website, and in a banner beside the game's map. Never over the map, and never in a way that changes how the game plays. There are no purchases that buy an advantage, and there will not be. If you choose to refuse cookies, the site still works and the game still works; you just see ads that are not tailored to you, or none.
Getting in touch
Use the contact form or email contact@merchantkingsofafrica.com. Bug reports with the world name and your kingdom name are the most useful thing you can send.