Dragon Keep: The Founding

A small civic-survival game about building something before everything falls apart.

You play as Aaron, the founding steward of Dragon Keep, during the settlement’s first desperate season on the Surface.

Every turn presents a crisis, complaint, shortage, proposal, accusation, or uncomfortable civic problem. Your only choices are:

Yes or No

That is the whole input. The consequences are the hard part.

Your decisions affect five settlement pressures:

• Supplies — food, fuel, stores, tools, medicine, and other things people keep arguing over
• Security — whether the walls, watch, and surrounding approaches can keep people alive
• Trust — whether people believe this society is worth cooperating with
• Order — whether rules, routines, and authority still function
• Labor — whether there are enough able hands to build the Keep before time runs out

You are not trying to become a hero. You are trying to keep a frightened, hungry, half-organized settlement alive long enough to become a civilization.

Current build

This is an early public prototype containing the full first season of play.

The first season focuses on:

• Immediate survival
• Rationing
• Refugee intake
• Basic shelter
• Emergency authority
• First work assignments
• Flood risk
• Waterproofing storage and shelter
• Early agriculture
• Social tension before formal factions emerge

A complete run is short, and replaying is encouraged. Different decisions can push the settlement toward different pressures, different memories, and different outcomes.

Tone

The game is grim, but not humorless.

Dragon Keep is full of exhausted workers, scared refugees, petty disputes, bad ideas, ration-line sarcasm, and people trying to sound more official than they are. The goal is not parody. The goal is to show how fragile society can feel when everyone is cold, hungry, tired, and convinced their complaint is the urgent one.

Prototype notes

This is not a finished commercial presentation.

Most art is placeholder. Some UI, effects, balancing, and presentation details are still rough. The current focus is testing the core experience:

Are the decisions understandable, tense, funny, frustrating, memorable, and worth replaying?

Feedback I am looking for

After playing, I would especially like to know:

• Did you understand what you were trying to accomplish?
• Did the yes/no decisions feel meaningful?
• Did the settlement stats make sense?
• Did construction feel like a real pressure?
• Were any cards confusing, unfair, too obvious, or too repetitive?
• Which cards stood out?
• Did the tone work?
• Would you play another run?
• What would make the game easier to understand without making it less tense?

Feedback is more useful than politeness. Rough edges are expected; unclear design is what I want to find.