Little Tree Kingdom is as instantly charming as games get. You want me to help a clan of cute little gnomes build a new town for themselves in a tree? Don't mind if I do! It even features a deckbuilding mechanic—one of my favourite genres—to lull you into a false sense of security.
A Charming Deckbuilder with a Cozy Facade
Each turn, your hand of cards dictates what you can add to the colony. The gameplay focuses on managing the "welfare" of the community across several categories, including happiness, security, and essence. If any of these scores drop below zero, you'll break the gnomes' hearts—and three broken hearts means game over.
The expansion process is quite creative:
- Tree Modification: Cards allow you to extend roots and branches or add leaves and flowers.
- Infrastructure: You can build houses to increase population or mines to gather underground resources.
- Beautification: The branch and root cards let you sculpt the tree into a unique shape.
At first, the threat seems mild. You can focus on the aesthetics of your town, using festivals and traders to grab new cards. As long as you keep the gnomes thriving, you might even forget about "gnome capitalism" entirely.
The Brutal Reality of Little Tree Kingdom
Wrong. The problem is that your resources are not infinite. In Little Tree Kingdom, cards can only be played a certain number of times before they are destroyed. Aside from buying new ones, there is no other way to replenish or expand your options.
It isn't long before you find yourself drawing barely useful hands that offer only slight bonuses. Your whimsical shopping trips won't be enough to keep you stocked as weather events and catastrophes chip away at your scores. Eventually, the true nightmare begins when the ghosts appear.
Defending Gnomeville from the Undead
It turns out this adorable forest is home to vengeful evil spirits intent on tearing down everything you've built. These ghosts periodically spawn at the edges of the map and begin an inexorable advance towards the tree.
To survive, you must build defences like spiked walls, arrow towers, and even thorns. However, these defences have a very small area of effectiveness, making a purely aesthetic tree design a fatal mistake. You need a shape that is actually defendable.
Ultimately, Little Tree and Kingdom is less of a contemplative cosy sim and more of a puzzle roguelike. The key to success is planning for disaster and aggressively using the merchant to find the exact cards you need to survive another nightmarish winter. It is a fascinating twist on the genre that you can test yourself with right now via the free demo on Steam.
