The Burh Holds

How it works, and what you are actually deciding

Six districts — the gate, the wharf, the market, the minster quarter, the ditch and the pasture side. Each one already stands at some strength and each one is worth something different to lose: the ditch is the strongest and the least valuable, the minster is the richest thing in the town and only middling strong.

Every day you have nine points of work to spend. Every night an attack comes. A district falls when the weight against it is more than what stands there — there is no roll anywhere in this game. The only thing you do not know is which of the four approaches you are facing, and once a district is gone it stays gone.

The first night is blind, and that is the whole shape of the game. You spend nine points on a guess, the night lands, and the morning leaves signs — a cut mooring rope, missing stakes on the north face, forty head of cattle gone. After that you know which way they are coming and you have eighteen points and two nights to make it count.

Five things were measured, and two of them came back broken

Two thousand sieges per figure, against the rules the page actually runs.

Reading the signs has to beat spreading the budget evenly. It does: the reader loses 6.05 worth of town, the flat allocation 8.02.

The signs have to be worth something — tested by taking them away. The same reader with the evidence withheld loses exactly 8.02: the flat spread's own number, because a defender who cannot tell the plans apart has nothing better to do than spread. The evidence is worth 1.97, and the mechanic dies without it.

A perfect siege has to be possible — and it was not. Holding all six districts through the last night needed 35 points of work against a total budget of 21, on every single approach, so the best outcome the game offers was text no player could ever reach. There were two causes: a budget too small, and a rule that put five of the six districts under real attack on every plan, which is not four ways in but four flavours of general assault. Now a clean siege is reachable and hard: optimal play holds the whole burh 26.1% of the time and loses something the other 74%, because the first night is blind.

And a fault the conditions did not anticipate, found while fixing that one: with the budget raised, a perfect hold was reachable on three of the four approaches and impossible on the fourth — coming off the water demanded ten points on the first night against a budget of nine. That is worse than being impossible everywhere, because it is invisible. Nothing in the game tells you the water is different; you would simply never manage it and never know why. One point of base strength on the pasture side fixed it.

No district may be safe to abandon — and the first two answers to this were the measuring apparatus talking, not the game. Filling leftover budget into the weakest district made the pasture un-loseable; changing that fill to round-robin moved the zero onto the market and the ditch instead. A number that moves when the measurement changes is measuring the measurement. Asked properly, all six districts both fall sometimes and stand sometimes, and abandoning one costs between 0.49 (the ditch — which is rather the point of a ditch) and 3.07 (the minster).

The reeve may never mourn a district that survived. Zero exceptions. That one is a correctness contract wearing a tonal coat.

The reeve

He argues with you while you spend and he is not on your side, exactly. When you fortify somewhere before you have seen anything he says so. When you read the signs and then build somewhere else, he says that too, and offers to hear the explanation later.

At the end he reads the list of districts you did not save, by name, with what was in each of them. If you lose nothing he has no list to read and seems annoyed about it. He never names a district that stood — that is enforced by a test, not by good intentions.

It runs in your browser and stays there

No account, no sign-in, no network. Your siege is a short code you can share, and the link opens on which way they came and what it cost you. There is no code on this page that could send anything anywhere: pages in this corner are forbidden to make requests at all, and a test enforces it rather than anybody remembering.

The burh is drawn with a 3D engine and the drawing carries the numbers. Height is strength — every point of work you put into a district raises its roofs, so a district you have poured the budget into is visibly taller than one you have not. Fire is loss: a fallen district burns for the rest of the siege. And the torches outside the wall appear only on the side they are coming from, once you have read the signs — before that the dark is dark on every side, which is the honest picture of what you know. If your browser will not give the page a canvas, all of it is described in numbers instead.

Argue about it in the forum

The board’s forum has a room for this. Post which way they came and what you gave up, and be told the minster was never worth it.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan game inspired by The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its setting and its premise under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

The burh here is not any particular burh and nobody in it is named. Alfred’s fortified towns are documented history — the Burghal Hidage lists them and their garrisons — and a town of six districts with a ditch, a wharf and a minster is the ordinary furniture of one. The reeve is an original character written for this game. Every line of text here was written fresh for it. No dialogue, novel text, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series or book is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has Lord of Bebbanburg, Hold the Wall, Holmgang, The War for the Kingdoms, Saxon or Dane, Arseling to Ealdorman, The King’s Shadow, Storm the Coast, the trivia rounds and the character pages. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside it, and the free tools that are not about anybody’s fiction. If you would rather play something with a map in it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.