About Ninth Province

Ninth Province is a small publication about online strategy, empire and adventure worlds that run in a web page. Three of us write it. We have played this kind of world since the days when a village and a barracks were the whole genre, and we publish one dispatch a season with five worlds in it.

The name

Every empire game has a ninth province: the one past the map you know, held by a player you have never met, quietly outproducing you. We liked the idea of writing from there rather than from the capital. Also, it was free to register.

What gets a dispatch

• Runs in a normal web browser with nothing to install.
• Free to register and to play properly. A shop is fine; a paywall on the core loop is not.
• No real-money gambling of any kind. We do not cover casino, slot or betting products and never will.
• Live for at least a year with an active English-speaking community.

How we are paid

The "Enter" buttons are affiliate links. Sign up through one and the publisher may pay us a small commission, which covers hosting. Publishers cannot buy a place in a dispatch, do not see copy before publication and have never been offered a higher score for anything. Scores are locked before links are added, and a world that falls below 7.0 on re-test is dropped, whatever the link earns.

Seasons

Four dispatches a year. Worlds carry over if they hold their score. We do not keep old dispatches online because an out-of-date review is worse than none.