“Surprise!” holler the Minecraft mob at Mojang, announcing that they’ve just released a “casual strategy game of geopolitical drama” for free. Crown and Council is now up on Steam, offering streamlined turn-based strategy to build up and crush kingdoms. It’s a nice spot of fun for a Friday afternoon. Here, I’ll explain a bit.

Crown and Council is a fairly simple turn-based strategy game on small maps divided into regions. Each region you hold will generate one gold per turn. One gold is also how much it costs to send your army into a region adjacent to your own and take over it. Unless there’s a three-gold Fort defending it, increasing the number of attacks a region can resist. Then you get expensives ships which can attack anywhere, villages which increase a tile’s gold output, universities… they’re simple pieces, but combine to be quite pleasing.

75 maps are included, and it has a generator to procedurally create more.

Crown and Council is the work of Mojang’s Henrik Pettersson, who has been tinkering with it for a while since starting it in a game jam. It’s out now free on Steam for Windows. Steam’s got a trailer too, if you want a peek first.

Mojang have released a fair few small free games before, but this is the first to get a formal store release. Heck, this is the first Mojang-made game on Steam (Cobalt, which they published but didn’t make, is already there).