tinyBuild We’ve all been there: your boss isn’t looking so you extend your lunch break a little bit, play some games on your phone, or just enjoy some quality staring-into-the-middle-distance time on your own. Most of the time that’s fine, but if your job is to defend a kingdom from rampaging goblins, it can be a little more problematic. A new strategy game puts you in charge of a king building a stable stronghold, where the toughest part of the job is keeping a watchful eye on what’s happening within its walls.The King Is Watching is a small-scale city building strategy game mixed with an auto battler. Within a small grid that makes up your castle, you place buildings that generate resources or train soldiers to sustain wave after wave of incoming enemies. Build an army strong enough to withstand each level’s final boss and you win, unlocking bonuses you can use to improve your next run or add other wrinkles to make it even more challenging. The hitch is that within your castle walls, the only tiles where any work will be done are those within your limited field of vision. Everyone else is slacking off.At the start of your run, all you’ll be able to build are three wells, which cost nothing to build and generate water. With enough water, you can plant wheat fields and forests, which produce grain and lumber used to train troops and build more advanced structures. But at the beginning, the king’s gaze is represented by a measly three highlighted squares, and only when you drag that V-shaped formation over a building will it produce its resource. As the game goes on, you can spend resources to increase the size of your gaze as well as your army — both of which are crucial for survival.Every minute or so, your castle will be attacked by goblins, giants, and all manner of other monsters, tracked by a timeline constantly marching forward at the top of your screen. Troops you build attack automatically when foes are in range, so the strategy comes from the composition of your army, not its maneuvers in battle. However, as the king, you can gain a large number of spells to use in battle, which can heal your troops, damage and debilitate enemies, or even raise demonic allies for a limited time.The small size of your kingdom hides the complexity of The King Is Watching. | tinyBuildThe hands-off approach to battle might make The King Is Watching sound like a fairly chill strategy game, but it’s anything but. Since only a few of your structures actually work at a time, you pay constant attention to where you’re looking, prioritizing both what you need to survive fights in the short term and what your kingdom needs to thrive over the course of the entire game. Space in your castle is extremely limited, but you’re free to move or disassemble buildings at any time to optimize which ones you’re able to keep activated at the same time. The result is a somewhat frantic game that mixes the organizational joy of arranging a Resident Evil inventory or placing Tetris blocks just right with the thrill of building a perfect army and slinging spells just where they’re needed on the battlefield.At first, keeping track of all the moving parts in The King Is Watching can be surprisingly overwhelming, and your first round or two are lucky to end in swift defeat. But it quickly becomes the kind of game you can sink hours into without noticing as you find the perfect arrangement of farms and barracks that let you survive onslaughts of dragons. Your performance in each run grants you resources that you can use to unlock upgrades, in typical roguelike fashion, and you’ll even get new kings to choose from, each with slightly different ways to play.The King Is Watching isn’t a typical city builder, but it satisfies some of the same desire to build a perfect kingdom and watch it thrive. More than that, though, it’s a deceptively fast-paced strategy game where the challenge lies less in your combat prowess than your ability to both plan and adapt under constant threat of annihilation.The King Is Watching is available now on PC.