Building a kingdom, pitching woo, and fighting dragons? What’s not to love?

There’s no doubt that Mac gamers love The Sims. Through the original game, countless expansion packs, and two reboots of the franchise, it’s a title that’s kept us entertained and scandalously unproductive for close to a decade. The latest entry, The Sims Medieval, continues the franchise’s tradition of deep, addictive gameplay, offbeat humor, and battleaxes.

Okay, that last one’s kind of new.

The Sims Medieval is a standalone game set in the Middle Ages, allowing players to get their micromanagement ya-yas out by steering the lives of a monarch and his or her subjects through the trials and tribulations of medieval life. After designing a King or Queen from the ground up, players are dropped into the middle of a beefy tutorial, covering a wide range of topics such as how to pitch woo in your royal court, hear petitions from your subjects, and demand and subsequently win a duel. As part of the tutorial, you’ll gather resources such as stone and wood, which are used by your subjects and the members of your court to build new structures for your kingdom, like churches and smithies and stables. This not only serves to make the commoners of your kingdom happier, but also allows for a deeper gameplay, as the new structures bring new ways to interact with your virtual world.

The heat of combat is interrupted when the King decides to show off his jazz hands.

As you expand your kingdom, you’ll attract wizards, warriors, and craftsmen to your side. Veteran players of The Sims will notice that while The Sims Medieval still focuses on your sims, a lot more time is spent on crafting their environment than in previous versions. Where you were able to design and decorate a house in The Sims 3, for example, The Sims Medieval has you build an entire kingdom. If that sounds awesome, it’s only because it is.

But even this great game has a few disappointments. For starters, it’s a power-hungry beast of a title. Before moving to a beefier system to conduct the rest of our review, we loaded The Sims Medieval on a mid-2010 2.66GHz 13-inch MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM. Despite the laptop’s meeting the game’s listed minimum requirements, we found The Sims Medieval to be a stuttering, graphical mess even when rocking the lowest of settings.

The bottom line. If you’ve got a machine capable of running it, The Sims Medieval is a rewarding gaming experience that you’ll keep coming back to for years to come.