With less than two weeks to go before the worldwide launch of Stronghold: Warlords, we thought it would it would be entertaining to give our developers a blind castle-building challenge! Tasked with building the ultimate castle in under 30 minutes, four Firefly devs are challenged (and judged!) on their time-limited castle building skills in this new video.

Paul, Aaron, Tom and Nick all begin on a new map with little to no preparation and a single objective: Build the ultimate castle! They must do so on the ‘Jungle Clearing’ medium-sized map within the time limit, with their creations judged by none other than Firefly Studios co-founder and Stronghold designer Simon Bradbury. These hastily-constructed castles are rigorously graded based on their castle aesthetics, economic efficiency and of course defensive strength. The series *is* called ‘Stronghold’ after all…

Also including a few minor feature additions, such as the ability to lock (or rotate) the mini-map and a helpful top-down castle view for building, today’s gameplay is taken from our latest Warlords build. You can expect more videos from this build next week and during launch, as we explore multiplayer mode and the game’s larger map sizes. In the meantime please wishlist Stronghold: Warlords to be notified of the game’s release and any launch discount.