Reigns

What it is. A narrative game reduced to one gesture: swipe left or right. An advisor presents a situation on a card; you choose one of two answers; the choice nudges four meters (church, people, army, treasury). Every meter has two lethal edges — too low and too high both kill you. Ruling is stewardship: not winning, just staying alive between the ditches one more reign.

Player fantasy. The impossible throne. Every decision helps one faction and hurts another; you can never satisfy everyone, only balance them. The pull is the grim comedy of doomed juggling — and the itch to see the next situation, because the deck is full of tiny stories you’ve only glimpsed.

Design DNA

The engine is meters between two ditches, fed by double-edged binary choices. Three parts. First, two-sided meters: a resource you must keep in a band, not maximise — depletion and excess both kill (genre-narrative-decisions). Second, every choice is a tradeoff: no move is pure gain; helping one meter costs another, so there’s no dominant policy (pattern-risk-reward). Third, minimal input, maximal consequence: one swipe, but it ripples through four systems — the depth is in the content (the card deck), not the controls. Judgement must beat any fixed policy (FUN.md §21: 19/20 vs always-left’s 0/20).

Load-bearing structures

Structure	Why it works
Two-lethal-edge meters	Keeping a resource in a band (not maxed) makes every gain a future risk — the core stewardship tension. → `genre-narrative-decisions`.
Double-edged binary choices	Every option helps one meter and hurts another; no dominant policy, so judgement matters. → `pattern-risk-reward`.
One-gesture input	Swipe left/right; the entire skill is reading and deciding, not executing. Radical accessibility. → `system-accessibility`.
Card-deck content	Situations are data cards drawn against state; content is the game, and it’s cheap to author and lint. → `system-collectibles`.
Conditional/flagged cards	Cards unlock from prior choices, threading arcs and callbacks through a shuffled deck. → `system-emergent-systems`.
Death as the loop	You will die; each reign is a run, and the deck keeps dealing new stories. → `system-session-structure`.

What to steal

Two-sided meters: a resource you keep in a band creates far richer tension than one you maximise — every gift is a future liability. → genre-narrative-decisions.
Make every choice double-edged: if any option is pure upside, delete it (FUN.md §21: “no no-op choices”). The tradeoff is the game.
Content-as-data: author situations as linted cards (unique ids, bounded effects |Δ|≤20, every needs-flag settable) so editorial judgement becomes CI.
One gesture, deep consequence: minimal input keeps the design about decisions, and makes it trivially accessible. → system-accessibility.

What’s just theme (drop it)

The medieval-monarch fiction — swipe-meters-stewardship fits a ship captain, a startup CEO, a dungeon master, a parent. → world-theme-vectors.
The four specific factions — the count and identities are tuning; 2–5 two-sided meters all work. → system-difficulty-and-dda.
The literal swipe — left/right is one binary-choice UI; buttons or dialogue options carry the same DNA.
Death-by-succession framing — the “reign” wrapper is flavour on “a run ends, a new one deals fresh cards.” → system-session-structure.

Composes into

genre-narrative-decisions — the parent genre; Reigns is its defining anchor (impossible stewardship; meters between two ditches).
pattern-risk-reward — every card is a double-edged, teeth-bearing choice.
system-difficulty-and-dda — meter volatility and card weighting are the difficulty knobs.
system-collectibles — the card deck as content the player uncovers.
system-accessibility — one-gesture input as a floor-level design.

Twist seams

Reigns but the meters are a factory (mechanic-swap) — swipes route throughput between competing subsystems; stewardship becomes logistics. Pairs with anchor-factorio.
Reigns but two rulers, one kingdom (perspective) — coop where each player owns two of the four meters and swipes can undermine the partner. Pairs with system-coop-and-competition.
Reigns but the deck is a colony sim (structure) — a RimWorld director deals the cards from live colony state; systemic drama in swipe form. Pairs with anchor-rimworld.
Reigns but cozy (tonal) — the “ditches” are gentle (a garden, a friendship) and death is retirement; balance without dread. Pairs with anchor-stardew-valley.