Saxon or Dane

How it works, and what the ring is for

Twelve decisions, four in each of three wars. Each one has an answer that keeps you where you are and an answer that puts you on the other side. Nothing is hidden — before you choose, the page tells you plainly which of the two crosses over.

Crossing over is not forbidden and it is not punished by the game. It is recorded. The arm-ring you are wearing dulls one band every time, it never brightens, and both of the men watching can see it. That is the whole mechanic: not a score you are trying to protect, but a thing you are visibly becoming.

Two judges, and they want different men

The priest counts oaths kept and mercy shown, and he counts a switch as a broken oath. His objection compounds — the second one costs more than the first, because what he objects to is not the decision, it is the kind of man who keeps making it. He also forgives a switch towards his own side more readily than one away from it, which is a double standard, and the game does not pretend otherwise.

The skald does not care which side you picked. He cares whether you went towards the difficult thing, and what he has no use for is a man who takes the safe answer. He does not mind you crossing over at all.

Those two are not two flavours of the same scoreboard, and that was checked rather than hoped: across every possible playthrough their scores correlate at r = +0.07, which is to say not at all. The priest's own best line lands at the 72nd percentile of the skald's scale. You can be respectable to both. You can be excellent to one.

The numbers, from every possible playthrough

Twelve binary decisions is 4,096 lines, so nothing about this game is estimated — all of it is enumerated. Sixteen verdict pairs and ten names are reachable; the commonest pair covers 15.7% of runs; and flipping any single one of the twelve decisions changes the verdict pair on between 45.5% and 82.9% of playthroughs, so there is no decision in here you were wrong to think about.

A line that tops both scoreboards exists. There are forty-three of them out of four thousand and ninety-six — 1.05%. The needle is real and it is thin, and for all practical purposes you are choosing which of the two men to disappoint.

And the ring is the game rather than an ornament on it: make switching free and the sixteen reachable verdict pairs collapse to four.

An earlier version of this game had no dilemma in it at all

In the first draft the skald punished switching too, alongside the priest. Enumerating all 4,096 lines showed exactly what that does: because both judges were docking you for the same event, their scores correlated at +0.765, the priest's best line sat at the 99th percentile of the skald's, and 54.8% of every possible playthrough landed on one identical verdict pair. It was one scoreboard wearing two hats, and it looked completely fine from the inside. That is why the numbers here are computed rather than reasoned about.

It runs in your browser and stays there

No account, no sign-in, no network. Your verdict is a short code you can share; the link opens on what the two of them said about you. There is no code on this page that could send anything anywhere — pages in this corner are forbidden to make requests at all, and a test enforces that rather than anybody remembering.

The ring is drawn with a 3D engine, twelve segments for twelve decisions, lit where you held and dull where you turned — so at the end the shape of your own war is on it. If your browser will not give the page a canvas, the ring is described instead and every decision and both verdicts are unchanged.

There is no right answer, and that is not a cop-out

The game does not have a winning line and does not award one. It has twelve situations that were genuinely difficult for the people who were actually in them — a hostage who is a child, a treaty that gives away families, forty men drowning on your beach — and two entirely coherent value systems that disagree about what to do. Uhtred's whole predicament is that he is legible to neither, and the point of this is to find out which of the two you turn out to be, not to score highly.

Argue about it in the forum

The board's forum has a room for this. Post which of the twelve you found hardest and be told, at length, why the other answer was obviously correct.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan game inspired by The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its setting and its premise under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

Every line of text in this game was written fresh for it, including all twelve situations and both judges' verdicts. No dialogue, novel text, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series or book is reproduced anywhere in it, and neither judge is a character from anything — a priest and a skald are the two people who would actually have been keeping score in the ninth century. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has Lord of Bebbanburg, Hold the Wall, Holmgang, The War for the Kingdoms, the trivia rounds and the character pages — including the shorter allegiance sorter this one grew out of. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside it, and the free tools that are not about anybody's fiction. If you would rather play something with a map in it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.