Your first week in KAMPUNG

Nine pictures, and the short version of what each one means. This is not the rulebook — that is the handbook, and it has every figure in it. This is the shape of the thing: what you are given, what to do with it first, and what happens when somebody decides they want it.

One newly raised stilt house on cleared ground at dawn, jungle close behind, everything else empty — One house, and a great deal of empty ground.

1You start with one village

That is the whole of it. No army, no second village, no head start — and neither has anybody else, however long they have played. A veteran of nine rounds begins the tenth with the same village you get on your first day, which is deliberate and is tested.

The village is raised the first time you look in after a round opens, wherever the map has room. Everything in this game runs in real time whether or not you are watching: timber accumulates, buildings finish, armies walk. Closing the tab does not pause anything.

You cannot be attacked at first. New villages get a protected spell to build in. Spend it on an economy and not on soldiers — troops raised on day one eat for a week and fight nobody. The current length is in the handbook.

One valley holding all four kinds of work: timber stacked at a grove edge, a cut laterite quarry, the mouth of an iron adit, and flooded paddy terraces — Timber, stone, iron, rice — one valley, four kinds of work.

2Four things everything is made of

Timber from the groves, stone from the quarry, iron from the mine, rice from the paddy fields. Every building costs some mixture of the four and every soldier costs them too.

Raise all four together rather than one at a time. A village strong in timber and short of stone is not a village ahead on timber — it is a village waiting for stone, and it will wait exactly as long as if it had built nothing at all.

Production stops dead at capacity. A resource sitting full overnight is production you never got. When that starts happening the answer is a Storehouse or a Rice Barn, not another mine.

Every cost and rate: the four resources and what each building does.

A great timber hall half raised in bamboo scaffolding, a crew hauling a beam up, the finished half standing beside the unfinished — The Grand Balai going up. Everything else waits its turn.

3One thing at a time

A village builds one thing at a time, with a couple more queued behind it. That constraint is most of the early game: the question is never what can I afford, it is what is worth the hours.

Raise the Grand Balai early. Every level of it makes every future construction faster, so it pays for itself and then keeps paying. It is the one building that is worth putting ahead of things you want more.

Soldiers train on their own separate line, so an army and a building can be under way at the same moment. And if an empty queue at three in the morning bothers you, the Steward is a standing order you leave behind — it builds while you are asleep.

What each level costs and buys · The Steward

Night beneath a stilt house: baskets of rice and iron lowered by lamplight into a dug pit under the floor planks — The Kolong. Poor, clever, and the thing people build the day after they needed it.

4What a raid cannot take

The Kolong is a cellar dug under the house. Whatever fits in it is hidden from anybody who raids you: they take what is lying in the open and leave what is buried.

Dig it before your protection ends. It is cheap, it costs no villagers, and it is the difference between a raid taking everything and a raid taking what you had spare. Nobody regrets building it early. A great many people build it the day after they needed it.

What it holds at each level

A rice barn with its doors open and the floor nearly bare, soldiers queuing outside for a ration in the last of the light — An army is a mouth before it is a weapon.

5Rice is not a resource

It is the other three, plus a limit. Villagers eat and soldiers eat, and a village that cannot feed what stands in it does not simply stop growing — soldiers starve, and the number on your muster roll goes down overnight with no battle anywhere near it.

Every soldier you raise is a standing cost. An army is not a thing you buy once. Raise one when you have a use for it, and keep the paddy fields ahead of it.

The same arithmetic is why a big army parked in somebody else’s village is still eating — their rice, not yours, which is worth saying out loud before you send help.

How upkeep is worked out

A column of spearmen and horsemen leaving a village gate along a jungle road at dawn, banners of green and gold above them — Out of the gate at first light. They will be hours on the road.

6Armies walk

There is no teleporting anything anywhere. An army sent across the map is on the road for hours, in the open, visible, and the whole column moves at the speed of its slowest member. A single siege engine can halve the pace of everything travelling with it.

You need a Muster Ground before a village can send troops anywhere at all, and the water genuinely means no: a march that would cross too much sea is refused rather than slowed, and getting an army across the strait means ships.

The distance is the decision. By the time your army arrives, the person you sent it at has had hours to see it coming, empty their stores and ask their kingdom for help. Plan the arrival, not the departure.

Every unit and its speed · Why the sea says no

The morning after an assault: a breached timber palisade, smoke rising straight up, survivors carrying the wounded across churned mud — A battle report, from the inside.

7The morning after

A battle is resolved by the server the instant an army arrives, and both sides get a report. It is not a fight you watch — it is a fight you read about, and the report is where the game actually explains itself: who was there, what died, what was carried off, what got knocked down.

Walls matter, and so does what you brought. Rams break a palisade; throwers flatten buildings; neither of them wins a battle on their own. An assault that arrives with no infantry is an assault that dies at the gate.

Read the reports you lose. They are itemised. The one that tells you why you lost is worth more than the three that tell you that you won.

How a battle is decided

Headmen seated on mats on the open veranda of a great timber hall, banners of several villages hanging behind them — A kingdom is people agreeing to answer each other.

8Nobody survives alone

Join a kingdom early, and a small active one beats a large quiet one every time. What it buys is not a bonus — it is people who answer at four in the morning.

A kingdom can see its members’ incoming attacks, call everyone to one wall, and land a dozen armies on a single hour. Twelve columns that arrive one after another are twelve columns beaten one after another; that is the whole reason coordination exists.

Say something the day you join. The people who get helped are the people whose names the others recognise. This is worth more than any building on this page.

Kingdoms, offices and treaties · Striking at one hour

At dusk, a scribe closing a bound palm-leaf chronicle on a low table, the harbour beyond going quiet as lamps are lit — The record closes. The next world opens empty.

9The round ends

Worlds do not run forever. A round is decided, the standings are frozen into a chronicle that outlasts the map, and a new world opens with everybody back to one village.

You take renown away with you, for having played and for what you did when it counted. It is a memorial and nothing else — it buys no advantage in the next round, on purpose, and there is a test that holds the game to it.

A bad first week is not permanent. This is the point of ending rounds at all: no kingdom owns the map indefinitely, and the question of who won gets an answer instead of trailing off.

How a round ends

That is the shape of it

Now go and be attacked by somebody

Everything else — every building, every unit, every number, the champion, the bazaar, the Friday night — is in the handbook, and the game will point you at the parts of it you need as you meet them.

Open your village The handbook Your first hour, in detail