Souls & Estates

What you do

• Start in 1670, 1700 or 1762, each with the prices, laws and history of its day, and play on to 1861.
• Set each village’s terms: rent in money, or days of labour on the manor’s fields. Every option shows the rubles a year and how the village will take it before you choose.
• Plough, plant, set out orchards and found new villages. Fields grow in rings of strips round each village and reach only as far as people can walk.
• Lay out the land yourself: put the mill on the river, the smithy by the road and the barns where you like, inside each village’s bounds. Out of room? Move a house.
• Turn the mouse wheel to go from one family’s yard to the whole estate, then the district as a table of miniatures, then a map table of central Russia.
• Hear the village elders: seed loans, a medic looking for a place, passes for winter work in town.
• Pay the poll tax on every name on the census list, living or dead, until the next count.
• Send sons into the Guards or the civil service, marry daughters well, winter in Moscow or Petersburg, and build the family nest.

The art book

A free 30-page art book is on the itch page: the estate in four seasons, the model kit, the interface’s six seasonal inks and three typefaces, every screen, the history behind the numbers and the looks we threw away.

Where to play

In your browser right here, or download the Windows build from itch.io. Desktop only, mouse and keyboard. English and Russian, switchable in the settings. The game is in development (version 0.104).