9 Kings Patch Notes — May 25, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Async. Multiplayer. PVP. The much awaited new game mode is officially here!
Multiplayer Mode introduces a massive new way to play 9 Kings. Fight players head to head on async battles and experience the core game experience of the game while being challenged like never before. Fighting against players from all over the world, you will face endless new challenges and will need to reinvent all you know about your 9 Kings strategies in an ever-changing world of enemies.
Seriously, we're super stoked about this patch. This is our most ambitious update yet and we're really looking forward to the next chapters of this journey. Together we hope we can make this a huge chapter that will make 9 Kings bigger than ever! :)
Anyway, with no further ado...
Patch 0.9: Multiplayer
⚔️ Async PVP battles
👑 Fight against 9 real kings armies (and kingdoms!)
💪 Climb 9 ladders, reach the top 9, and become the king of kings.
🥸 Fully customize your king with 99+ vanity items.
🏅 Complete daily missions for extra points.
Here's the full breakdown of what you can expect from this brand new game mode:
Async PVP
In this new game mode, we have 9 kings from all over the world fighting to find out whose kingdom lasts longer. But only one can climb up the ranks and become the king of kings. The PVP dynamic creates a fresh and totally new way to play 9 Kings. Be ready for short & intense runs and insane match ups.
An async experience means we're keeping the core spirit of 9 Kings intact, and allowing you to play at your own pace while also changing the game's challenges entirely. You will be facing players who played before you, under the same conditions, and the same rank. You will be matched with players in the same level as you, making it a challenging competitive experience for all kinds of players. But be prepared: this game mode will really test your skills like never before.
In Multiplayer, you'll experience a different kind of battle: Your base card now has HP. You'll start with 5 cards. Diplomacy is made when a king dies. You won't lose lives in the first 3 years (Mulligans). And much more.
Competitive Ladders
Climb your way through 9 ranks, become one of the top 9 players, and reach ultimate 9 Kings glory. The different ladders will offer a competitive, engaging, and fluid experience. But we designed it in a way you can fun regardless of your ambitions. We'll be paying close attention to the ladder balancing in the coming days and we look forward to see what will come out of it!
Customizable Kings
A Punk King of Nothing? An afro King of Greed? A pirate King of Nature? Customize your own avatar and the 9 Kings in ways you never thought would be possible. With the medals you get from multiplayer battles, you will unlock 99+ unique vanity items and victory tracks (more to come!). We had so much fun with this and we hope you do to.
Daily Missions
Get extra motivation to get to battle with daily missions. Those will keep runs fresh and fun, motivate you to get new achievements and diversify your play style, and give you bonus medals to unlock new items!
A new boss, an epic ending
If you're one of the few to make it to year 33, you will face the final showdown. And a foe more powerful than any other. There's no running from him, but you can test your might like never before and keep the score! The final battle works as a tie break between the kings who endured that far, and is intended to keep runs dynamic and fresh. Oh, and if you reach year 33, you'll earn +3 bonus medals!
Unlocking the new game mode
To unlock multiplayer, all you need is to have played the base game 9 times. This is very intentional, as multiplayer requires basic knowledge of the game and its kings. Like Quest Mode, there is a learning curve. And though you can just jump in after 9 games if you feel like it, we recommend understanding the basics of the game before joining. It's gonna be fun, we promise!
Overall improvements
As always, this patch comes with more important tweaks to the game. See below:
Balancing & Gameplay:
Warlord's base now shoots arrows after the last Warlord troop dies.
Removed Nostalgia blessing. It was just not fun enough.
Innovator perk (Progress): you now start with Concabulators instead of Reinforce cards. We found the previous iteration to be underwhelming to most players. This should be a considerable buff to Progress early game.
Ingenious perk (Universal): now gives you +3 levels instead of +5. This is long due, given we now have Regression and a buffed Patronage.
Executioner (Progress) now has 9 troops.
Orbiter (Time) now has 9 troops.
Warlord (Nomads) now has 9 troops.
Camp (Nomads) now triggers its own effect when placed.
Mob (Nomads) HP and damage were increased.
Temple (Rainbow) now gives a 9% boost.
There is now a cap on the number of cards you can have in your hand. It's still broken (36 cards!), but we needed to add a guardrail to prevent closed loops that are just not fun. We want every run to flow naturally, and we don't want to make people feel like they're missing out if they're not exploring an endless exploit. Not to mention we want you to be able to view your board.
If you travel back in time 33 years, you'll break the time continuum and be warped to the nearest boss fight. Like we said in the previous bullet point, our goal is for every run to flow naturally.
Updated Merchant's Rainbow card pool. Each Jack will now only sell Rainbow cards of their own type (we have enough in the pool now).
King of Blood got a lil cool map revamp.
Quest: Against the Void enemies strength was scaled down.
Chaos Mode Quests: Battlecamp, Nowhereland, Riots, Unification are now harder.
QoL & Fixes:
Quest Mode now displays a "Restart" button after you lose a game!
Fixed a bug where some quests wouldn't unlock properly.
Expansion tower animation is now faster.
"The year is..." screen is now faster.
Plot tooltip is now displayed on the side of the plot to improve visibility.
Fixed chest visual layer placement.
Fixed Wall visual layer placement (this was ugly as hell, sorry!)
Improved Warper performance.
Improved Stalemate scalability on very late game builds to prevent soft locks.
Fixed several occurrences of the "ghost troop" bug.
Fixed several occurrences of the troop freeze bug.
Updated localization
*Developer note
Whenever we drop a big patch like this, I try to talk a little bit about our ambitions and vision for the game. So here we go!
We think Multiplayer mode can be a massive addition to 9 Kings, making it more replayable, shareable, and engaging than ever while also retaining its essence. Async design means we were able to mix strengths of what we like the most about 9 Kings and multiplayer games. A year ago, most people wouldn't think that blend would be possible (ourselves included!) and yet here we are. And we couldn't be more stoked.
Please bear in mind: this is an EA version, so you can expect a lot of tweaks, balancing decisions, and bug fixes as we learn with your help. We wanted to be bold with the design of this game mode and this means some things might be broken (that was always the nature of 9 Kings, after all). Of course, it's just the start. We hope you give it a shot and let us know your thoughts.
And for those who are not interested in multiplayer, we have two notes: first, consider giving it a shot, you might be surprised! And second, single player will keep getting all the love it deserves as the core 9 Kings experience. Expect new content & big community requests being addressed very soon. We intend to improve everything in the coming weeks. You can expect balancing patches, more content, QoL, and polishing ahead of 1.0.
After downloading the patch, please start a new run, as your previous run won’t have the updates stored and they may cause conflicts. If you experience any issues, please email us at [email protected].
Steam Reviews: Your Feedback Matters
We've been reading through all your Steam reviews, and we appreciate the feedback we've been receiving. Please continue sharing your thoughts, so we can know to focus on for each upcoming patch and make 9 Kings the best game it can be. It's really important to us!
Please join us on Discord and Reddit. You can also find the 9 Kings wiki page here for information on the game! Love, Sad Socket team
Love,
Sad Socket team