Evony: The King's Return — A City Builder in Pin-Puzzle Clothing

The ad

A medieval king is trapped in a dungeon. Lava on one side, treasure on the other. Between them: a series of pins. Pull them in the right order and the king wades through gold. Pull them wrong and he dies screaming in a pool of fire.

You have seen this ad. You have seen it on TikTok. You have seen it on YouTube. You have seen it wedged between Instagram stories at 2 AM. Top Games Inc., the studio behind Evony, has produced thousands of these creatives — enough to populate a small museum by themselves.

What the real game is

Evony: The King's Return is a city-building real-time strategy game. You gather resources. You build walls. You train archers. You join an alliance and wage war on other alliances. It is, mechanically, a close relative of Clash of Clans, Rise of Kingdoms, and every other medieval-themed mobile RTS that has existed since 2015.

The pin-pulling puzzles? They exist — technically. They appear as a side minigame that unlocks intermittently as you level up your city. But here's the critical detail the UK's Advertising Standards Authority flagged: players who don't level up through the city-building core loop are eventually locked out of the puzzles entirely. The thing the ad sells you is gated behind the thing the ad doesn't mention.

Regulatory action

In a landmark ruling, the ASA formally banned Evony's ads, stating they misrepresented the game's "core playing experience." The ASA found that:

• The core gameplay required to progress through the storyline was city building, not puzzle-solving
• Players who downloaded the game expecting puzzles would encounter a fundamentally different product
• The ad was therefore misleading under CAP Code rule 3.1

This ruling didn't stop the ads. It barely slowed them down. The ads simply shifted to jurisdictions with weaker enforcement and continued running at industrial scale.

Our Lie Score: 9/10

The puzzle mechanic exists in the game, which keeps it from a perfect 10. But it is so deeply buried under city-building progression, so aggressively gated behind leveling, and so thoroughly secondary to the actual game loop that advertising it as the core experience is, by the UK government's own assessment, a lie.

The bigger picture

Evony represents a specific evolution of the fake-ad playbook. Where Homescapes accidentally stumbled into deceptive advertising (the pin-puzzle was a late addition to the game, added partly because the ads went viral), Evony appears to have reverse-engineered the formula: find whatever creative gets the most clicks, then bolt a minimal version of that gameplay onto your existing product to maintain a thin veneer of plausibility.

It's not just misleading advertising. It's misleading product development — building just enough of the lie to survive a legal challenge.