Swipe Kingdom

What it is. Reigns’ left/right card deck, but every swipe also lays a brick. Four meters you keep off the ditches; one settlement on screen that visibly grows or rots as those meters move. Choice stays one gesture; the consequence stops being an abstract bar and becomes a place.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. You are the harried steward who can never please everyone — say yes to the miller, the guild seethes; fund the wall, the granary empties. The pull is watching your town answer back. A good reign is a skyline; a bad one is a ruin you built one careless swipe at a time.

The brief

Reigns but your choices build a city — twist vector: mechanic-swap. Keep the swipe; swap the invisible faction bars for a settlement you can see.

The spine

Every binary swipe grows one of four systems while starving another, so the same gesture that raises your skyline is the one that tips a meter toward the ditch that ends the reign.

Part	This game
Objective	Keep the reign alive — steer the settlement through card after card without any meter reaching a ditch
Superpower	The binary swipe — one gesture (left / right) that commits to a card and moves the four meters
Scarcity	The four meters, two ditches each: you can’t raise all at once, so every point poured into one system is drained out of another (a zero-sum-ish web)
Obstacle	The deck’s demands — each card is a fork that shoves a meter hard toward an edge; feed one faction and its rival seethes
Renewal	Each new card re-poses the same balancing act against a fresh demand; a deck drawn from the city’s own state closes the loop into itself

Resonance

Every element traces to the spine — the coherence proof (see process-the-spine).

Element	Arrow back to the spine
Verb: the binary swipe	The single agency; every choice is one gesture that commits and moves the meters — `genre-narrative-decisions`
Power creates the problem	Every swipe that raises one meter drains another, so building your city is the same act that courts a meter’s collapse → growth is the doom engine (passes the gate)
Scarcity: four meters, two ditches each	You can’t lift all four at once; each swipe robs a Peter to pay a Paul, so it’s a trade, never a free gain — the `pattern-feedback-loops` web
Renewal: the card deck	Each card re-poses the same balance against a fresh demand; a deck authored by the city’s state renews the tension from within
Death-handling: any meter to an edge ends the reign	Spine is impossible stewardship under scarcity; a reign that couldn’t end would defuse the ditches, so the loss must land (`antipattern-dissonance` if softened)
Setting: the settlement is the meter	The scarcity made physical and legible — you read the danger off the skyline, not a bar (`pattern-readability`, `anchor-frostpunk`)
Theme: the harried steward who can’t please everyone	The mechanic (raise one, starve another) is the metaphor — no ruler satisfies every faction at once
Feel: the town reacts within the same beat	Makes the trade seen the instant you commit; the skyline is the telegraph, so the cost is legible on every swipe (`world-narrative-delivery`)

No row is decoration; no row fights the spine. The gate holds: the swipe that builds your city is the same swipe that starves it.

Anchors

anchor-reigns — the whole spine: card deck, binary swipe, four hidden-then- shown meters, death when any meter hits an edge. Steal the loop wholesale.
Secondary read: anchor-frostpunk for how a settlement’s state carries moral weight better than a number ever does — the city is the scoreboard.

Genre + systems pulled

genre-narrative-decisions — the swipe grammar, card authoring, and the rule that every choice is a real fork, not flavor (guard against antipattern-fake-choice).
genre-city-builder — the exposed-score discipline: meters render as buildings, roads, crowds. Its economy of visible upkeep is your feedback surface.
system-economy — the four resources the meters are: coin, faith, army, people. Cards spend and grant them.
pattern-feedback-loops — the balance-between-ditches tension: nudging one meter up drags another down, so equilibrium is fragile and every card matters.
system-resource-loops — pin the loop cadence so the deck can’t stall into a dominant no-brainer swipe (guard against antipattern-boring-optimal).

Do not restate these — open them. This recipe is the wiring diagram; they are the parts.

The twist applied

Vector: mechanic-swap. Reigns already runs on four meters — you don’t add a system, you re-render one. The bars leave the HUD and become the town:

Reigns meter	Swipe Kingdom meter	What it renders as
Church	Faith	temple + shrines lit or dark
People	People	houses, market crowd density
Army	Army	walls, barracks, banners
Treasury	Coin	granary fill, gilding, potholes

The death condition is unchanged (any meter to either edge ends the reign), but now the player reads the danger off the skyline instead of a bar — the settlement is the telegraph. See world-narrative-delivery for showing state through place, not text.

The 3 pillars

Impossible stewardship. No card is free. Every yes robs a Peter to pay a Paul — the four meters are a zero-sum-ish web (via pattern-feedback-loops), so you are always trading, never winning outright.
Visible consequence. The town is the meter. A swipe must produce a seen change within the same beat — a house goes up, a banner falls — or the twist is dead weight and you’ve just re-skinned Reigns (antipattern-false-depth).
Meters between ditches. Fun lives in the narrow band away from all four edges. Cards that shove a meter hard are the drama; the deck’s job is to keep you sweating that band, never comfortable, never instantly dead.

Twist seams to explore

Each is another “X but Y” you could bend further — pick one, don’t stack all:

Reigns but the deck is drawn from your city’s state (rules-recontext) — a starving town draws famine cards; a rich one draws greed cards. The settlement authors the deck, closing the pattern-feedback-loops into itself.
Reigns but the city persists across reigns (structure) — the heir inherits the skyline you left, so a ruin is a real bequest. Ties into system-meta-progression and gives death a legacy instead of a reset.
Reigns but two rulers swipe the same city (mechanic-swap) — split the deck across a monarch and a rival; contradictory swipes fight over one settlement. See genre-city-builder pressure meets asymmetric authorship.

Keep exactly one seam for the first playable. A second is a sequel, not a scope.

Scope & first playable

The smallest thing that proves the twist is felt, not just present:

Piece	First-playable scope
Deck	20–30 cards, hand-authored, each with a left and right consequence tuple
Meters	4 values, 0–100, start at 50; edge on either end ends the reign
Settlement	One screen, ~4 building clusters, each cluster mapped to one meter’s value
Swipe	Drag left / right; card text + speaker; reveal the two nudges on release
Death	Any meter hits 0 or 100 → end card naming which meter killed the reign
Score	Reign length in cards survived — the `genre-city-builder` exposed score

Build order: meters + swipe + death first (that’s playable Reigns), then wire the settlement render to the meters. Ship nothing until the town visibly reacts — that reaction is the entire reason this recipe exists. Author the settlement as a cosmetic view of meter state (a pure function of the four numbers), so it never touches game logic — see pattern-readability for keeping the read instant.

First feel-check: swipe once and ask did the town change where I looked? If the eye has to hunt for the consequence, the twist failed — tighten the map from meter to building before adding a single card.

Handoff

A design isn’t done until it names its proofs.

Choice quality → design/FUN.md §21 · Narrative Decisions (the verify-with target): every card a real fork, no dominant swipe, deck can’t be solved on turn one. Guard against antipattern-fake-choice and antipattern-decision-paralysis.
Systemic read → genre-city-builder‘s exposed-score discipline: a spectator must infer meter health from the skyline alone.
Loop tension → pattern-feedback-loops + pattern-pacing-and-tension: prove the meters stay in the sweaty band and that no swipe is free.

Composes with

anchor-reigns — the loop this recipe borrows whole.
genre-narrative-decisions — card grammar and fork integrity.
genre-city-builder — the settlement as visible scoreboard.
pattern-feedback-loops — the zero-sum web that makes every swipe cost.
system-economy — the four resources the meters model.