The game is wonderfully simple to explain to new players. Each player receives 8 cards representing buildings in their medieval town, arrayed in a particular order face up in front of them. In the center of the play area, 6 workers are revealed in a line, from a deck of worker cards. Each card displays a worker that corresponds to either one or two of your buildings. On your turn, you pick one card, assign it to the corresponding building in your town, then deal a new worker card to the end of the line.
Each player begins the game with 5 small meeples. Taking the worker at the front of the center line is "free." If you want to take something deeper in the line, though, you must pay meeples for it, placing one meeple onto worker card that's in line before the one you want. When later players make their choice, if the worker has any meeples on it, you take them for yourself. (But you can only have a maximum of 5 meeples at one time. Any extras leftover after your turn are immediately converted to a victory point each.)
Each time you place a worker card in a building, you activate that building's special power. Everything scores points, scaling up if you've focused on certain activities. Some are quite straightforward, like Mills scoring points for each worker you've placed there. Others reach wider, like Guardhouses scoring for the workers you've placed not just there, but in two other kinds of buildings too. Some buildings pay off all players: Breweries, for example, make points for you for each worker there AND points to every player who has at least one worker in a Mill.
The game ends after 12 rounds of drafting, and then comes endgame scoring. Points are awarded for diversity (a square of the number of building types you occupy), and also for majority in each of the seven building types (an amount shown on the building type itself). The highest score wins.
There are a few wrinkles to change things up. One type of building is an attack on each of your opponents, forcing them to send an existing worker to the "Infirmary" until they can be healed to work again. Another type of building protects you from that, if you have more workers defending than the attacker has on the offense. All the buildings are double sided, so if you tire of building relationships being configured one way, you can flip them all over for a different game experience.
The decisions are just nuanced enough to be interesting, and just easy enough not to be brain burners. An entire game with explanation can be finished in just 30 minutes, even with a new player. Veterans can breeze through it in half the time. But I really can't think of other games that pack something as satisfying in just 15 minutes -- not something that feels like a reasonable approximation of a thinking gamer's Euro game.
No, this is not going to displace whatever your favorite 90 minute plus game is. That's not the point. It's a perfect "just one more" game, or a perfect "over beers and conversation" game. I think it has great potential as a new "introduction to Euro gaming" game, for a player who at least has played a few card games with some strategy. (You might not convert, say, Game of Life fans.) This is a game that you yourself won't mind playing, and won't be rushing to graduate your new gaming converts out of.
Grading on a spectrum of what I'd most enjoy playing, I'd say Majesty: For the Realm might top out at about a B+. But for what it's able to achieve in a short span of time and short list of rules, the design feels like an A to me. So I'll call the game an A- overall. It's impressed me more than just about anything else I've tried recently.
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