Beasts and Bumpkins

Beasts and Bumpkins is a 1997 real-time strategy video game. It was developed by Worldweaver Productions and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows.

In the game's storyline, the player was exiled by the king. They begin with limited resources and a few peasants to control. After building an empire and increasing their resources, the player can challenge Dark Lord Sabellian, who attacks the surrounding area.

The game is a standard isometric 'god' style game. The player's goal is to complete a specific task on each level, be that collect a scroll or kill a certain bad guy. The main focus of the game is building up their village and growing their community.

During the game villagers simulate a life to death experience, from birth they go to childhood to a working adult after which comes their retirement and then eventually death. The working women do only the farm work and reproduce the population, while the working males can be given harder labour such as building or training at the various guilds which gives them new working skills to help them advance your village.

Starting with only a couple of houses, the player may soon build everything from farms to guilds, deploying the populous to perform various tasks, such as collecting water, farming or even procreation.

The game was well known for its humor. All of the characters had a stereotypical English West Country accent. The true hilarity came from the villagers sound bytes including "Fancy a bit of nookie?" and "oww, yes please!" responses.

Confirmed working on XP SP3 providing the game installer is run in '98 compatibility mode to c:\beasts otherwise the installer truncates filenames when written to the registry. The main game executable should also be run in compatibility mode.