Press kit

Short description

Glyph Dynasty is a city builder set in ancient China and drawn entirely in text characters. Lay out streets so that walkers carry water, food and faith to every door, raise houses through eight levels, honour three ancestors and build the Great Wall, the Grand Canal and the Hall of Light.

Long description

Glyph Dynasty begins with a handful of huts on the high road in the Xia epoch and ends with a capital of tiled roofs, gardens and monuments. Every building, cart and lantern on the map is made of characters, drawn in a dense 3/4 view with roofs, shadows and a day and night cycle.

The city runs on walkers. Vendors, priests, healers and tax collectors roam the streets, and a house only improves when the right people pass its door. Carters move goods from fields and workshops to granaries and warehouses; caravans and ships trade with neighbouring cities; the court of the Son of Heaven asks for favours and sends gifts.

Three ancestors guard the fields, the river and the kilns, and punish a city that forgets them. Floods, droughts, plague, locusts and earthquakes arrive with a warning. In later epochs raiders test your walls, towers and companies of infantry, crossbowmen and chariots.

A campaign of ten missions leads through the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, and free play opens the epochs one by one up to the Han. The game is fully translated into English, Russian, French, Spanish and Simplified Chinese.

Key features

• Walkers. Every service walks the street
• Housing. Eight steps from lean-to to master's house
• Food, crafts and trade. Granaries, workshops, caravans and the court
• Faith, culture and ancestors. The ancestors remember
• Monuments and epochs. Monuments that take years
• Army. Walls, towers and three kinds of troops
• Disasters. Rivers rise, locusts come
• Languages. Five languages, one Son of Heaven