The War for the Kingdoms

How the war works, and why standing decides it

Fifteen shires. You start with two — Athelney and Somerset, which is to say a marsh and the ground next to it. Guthrum holds six, including everything worth holding. The other seven are uncommitted, and that word is doing a lot of work: they are not neutral parties waiting to be conquered, they are thegns with their own reeves and their own harvests, watching to see which way this goes before they commit anyone's sons to it.

Each shire has a price in standing — how much you have to look like winning before it will declare for you. Wiltshire needs a little. Sussex needs a lot. Reach a shire with enough standing and it joins you; reach it without and it hears you out politely and sends you away, and you are worse off for having asked.

Four things you can do with a year

Raise the fyrd and your host grows by one. Build a burh in a shire you hold and you gain two standing — and that shire can never be taken back, because a burh is a ditch, a bank and a palisade, and Guthrum's answer to those was historically to go somewhere else. March along a road: onto Danish ground it is a battle, onto uncommitted ground it is an argument. Or send for terms.

Battles are arithmetic, not dice. Your host plus your standing, plus one if there is a burh at your back, against Guthrum's host. You can see all four numbers before you commit. This is a game about arriving with enough, not about hoping.

Guthrum has a host and it walks

He is not a difficulty setting. He has a position on the board, and between your turns he moves it — down the roads, towards the nearest shire of yours he can actually take, and he takes it when he arrives and is still the stronger. When he is not, he pulls back and will not be drawn, and his camp is bigger by morning.

He also writes to you. What he says depends on how the war is actually going: he is contemptuous while he is winning, businesslike while it is level, and careful once it is not. The dispatches are worth reading, because they are the cheapest way of finding out what he thinks his position is.

And he will treat. He cedes shires when your standing outruns his tolerance, which is half whatever strength he has left — so beating him down and looking like a winner are two routes to the same table, and terms taken early cost you fewer men than terms taken late.

The numbers were measured, and an earlier set was thrown away

Before this game shipped, four thousand campaigns were played out against it by three automatic players, to three conditions set in advance: a thoughtful line has to win most days, obvious play has to lose often, and random play has to lose nearly always. A thoughtful two-ply line wins 92.8%, the obvious line — walk at the enemy, raise the fyrd when outmatched — wins 29.3%, and random choices win 4.1%. Take burhs away from the thoughtful player and it falls from 92.8% to 33.9%, which is how we know standing is the game rather than a label on a number.

An earlier set of numbers was thrown out entirely. In the first model of this game Guthrum could only take a shire of yours that already bordered Danish ground — and neither shire you start with does, so he never moved at all: nought shires taken across four thousand eight hundred turns. It reported a perfectly plausible-looking 80.6%, and it was measuring a solo building puzzle with a decorative enemy in it. Giving him a host that walks is what made this a war, and every number above was re-derived afterwards.

The same war for everybody, today

The year's events come from the date, so every player anywhere fights the same fourteen years on the same day and can argue about the same decision. Start again after you finish and you get a fresh war.

It runs in your browser and stays there

No account, no sign-in, no network. Your campaign is a short code you can share; the link opens on what you did. 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 that rather than anybody remembering. Guthrum is not an AI and nothing here talks to one: his dispatches are written lines chosen by his position, which is also why he is readable, which is the point of him.

The board is drawn with a 3D engine, and if your browser will not give the page a canvas the campaign does not care: every shire, road and number is in the text. It is the same war either way.

What actually happened

Alfred spent the early months of 878 at Athelney in the Somerset levels after Guthrum's winter attack on Chippenham, came out in the spring, won at Edington, and took Guthrum's baptism and a treaty rather than his life. The burh system — a network of fortified towns nobody could ride past — was the thing that made the recovery stick, and it is why building one here is worth more than a battle. This game is shaped by that history and is not a reconstruction of it: the shires, the numbers and the timings are a game's, not a chronicle's.

Argue about it in the forum

The board's forum has a room for this. Post the year it went wrong and be told which burh you should have built instead.

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.

Alfred, Guthrum, Athelney, Edington and the burhs are recorded history, not anybody's intellectual property, and that is the material this game is built from. Every line of text in it 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. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has Lord of Bebbanburg, Hold the Wall, Holmgang, the trivia rounds and the character pages. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside this one, and the free tools that are not about anybody's fiction. If you would rather play something with a map you can zoom, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.