Cattle Kings Docs

Cattle Kings is a ranch you play in real time. A season is seven real days. You build a herd, keep it fed and watered, and turn grass, timber, and cattle into TOUGH. The player who manages those assets well finishes with more TOUGH than the others.

You start at the ground level. An account and a verified email open the ranch. A free start puts 2,000 TOUGH in your hand. It does not hand you a herd. Your first cattle come from a pack in the Mercantile, or from an animal another player has listed in the Sale Yard. Put them in a corral and feed them. Health falls when they go unfed, and hay is what brings it back.

The herd is Longhorn and Range, in three lines of blood: Ironhide, Dustborn, and Skybrand. A cow comes into heat. A bull in her corral, a BIK taken from a bull, or an embryo at the clinic can settle the next calf. While a bull calf is still young you choose his life. Leave him a bull and he can breed, produce BIKs, and be sold to other players. Castrate him and he becomes a steer, cheaper to feed and paid in full on the commodity market. Purebreds carry a mark and have their own sale. After weaning, a feedlot is where an animal puts on the weight the markets pay for. Every one of those choices spends hay, time, and TOUGH, and each one pays differently.

Land is a 160-acre tract in the High Lonesome Range. The first ground is the Headwaters of the Marrow, and you choose Desert, High Country, Prairie, or Wetlands. Grass feeds the herd for a season, measured in AUMs. Brush and timber grow back out of that grass. Clear the brush and those acres return to pasture. Sell the timber and a logging crew pays you in TOUGH. Surface water and a well decide whether cattle on a dry tract stay sound. A cow and a bull left on the same tract can breed there, and the calf is born on that ground.

TOUGH is the money of the ranch. You earn it by selling meat cattle on the commodity market, by selling breeding stock in the Sale Yard, by entering sound purebreds in the Purebred Sale, and by harvesting timber. You spend it on hay, water, cattle, crews, and land.

The sections along the side of this book take each of those pieces one at a time. What is written here is the shape of the game. The pages that follow are the basics of each part.