Kings of Chaos, commonly referred to as KoC, is a turn-based massively multiplayer online role playing game. When starting, one can choose to be normal people, midgets, people with pointy ears, or green guys with no dental plans.

In December of 2002, Rocco Repetski started Kings of Chaos as a web-programming experiment at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. In the beginning, the game was extremely simple. Players sign up, and based on the number of friends they can get to click their link, move up or down in the rankings. Very rapidly, the game spread, now enveloping most of the world to become one of the largest MMORPGs. When the game started, people referred to it simply as Chaos, but with continued growth and a server of its own, a formal name developed. Rocco and his friends – Ben Gelb, Aman Gupta, and Nick Meyer – came up with several ideas, including Reign of Chaos, Rain of Chaos, Lords of Chaos, and Chaos Reign, until they agreed on the name we have come to know it as - Kings of Chaos.

The game begins with you having the choice to become one of four races: Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Orcs. Each race has its own advantages. Humans receive an income bonus, dwarves a defense bonus, elves a covert bonus, and orcs an attack bonus. In Age 3, elves appear to have a huge advantage as they get a bonus on spies and sentries. Once a race is chosen, it cannot be changed until the next age without resetting the account. Players can gain strength by purchasing weapons from the armory and having friends click a unique recruiting URL issued to each player. It is illegal to email the link to people other than friends and allies and post the link in chat rooms, newsgroups, message boards, or forums unless the manager specifically allows it. Every thirty minutes, players receive one attack turn and a turn-based gold. Each soldier receives twenty-eight pieces of gold, and each covert operative receives fifteen pieces of gold. With the attack turns accumulated, players can attack other players, possibly inflicting casualties and stealing gold. If a player has spies, that person may send his spies on covert operations attempting to learn more about an opponent or to sabotage the opponent’s weapons. The sentry level protects others from sabotaging or seeing the amount of gold a player has unless another's spy level is stronger. With the money one gains, a player is able to buy offensive weapons, defensive weapons, spy and sentry tools, upgrade siege, fortification, or covert levels, train soldiers, and/or buy mercenaries. Buying these items raises the attack, defense, and covert action ranks used to calculate all players' overall ranks every hour. Another feature of the game is Vacation Mode. In case a player will be offline for an extended time, he can irreversibly suspend his account for a period of time from seven to thirty days. After the time expires, the account reactivates. Through the suspension, the account will not receive any gold, nor be attacked or otherwise touched by any other player. Finally, players on Kings of Chaos can communicate through two methods: a chat room and a messaging system somewhat like email. In the messaging system, URLs require spaces for correct viewing. For example:
Incorrect – http://www.kingsofchaos.com
Result - ****
Correct – http ://w ww.kingsofchaos.c om
Result - http ://w ww.kingsofchaos.c om
Words to be avoided: http:// , www , com , net
With slight difficulty, Kings of Chaos is able to be used without cookies enabled.

Once signing up and logging in, the player moves to the command center. This page shows all of the statistics of one's army, including the size and amount of trained soldiers, and one's strike action, defensive action, spy rating, sentry rating, and overall rank. From here, one can choose from a variety of options. If a player wants to upgrade or buy new weapons, he can click on the Armory button and proceed from there. Likewise, if he wants to train more soldiers, the player can click the Training button. There are also buttons for the Command Center, purchasing mercenaries, attacking, an attack log of all recent attacks by and against a player, an intelligence file showing covert operations along with intercepted operations, a buddy list, where one can label up to 150 players per category as buddies, allies, enemies, alliance members, or neutral, and a logout button. In order to label buddies, proceed to the player's statistics page by clicking on the screen name and change the "Recognize player as..." option.

Siege levels increase the overall strike 33.3% per upgrade, and fortification levels increase the overall defense 25% per upgrade. The spy level increases by 2 to the power of the spy level. For a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet¹ designed to assist players in calculating all of the various ranks, go here - Kings of Chaos: Age 3 Stats V3.0

The designers of Kings of Chaos chose to divide the game into separate ages. By doing this, it allows no one the opportunity to get to the top and stay at the top forever. When a new age comes, all players begin anew, just as when joining the game, so that every one has an equal opportunity to excel. Also, by having different ages, the four game makers could change different aspects of the game. For example, the Age 3 Beta Test started without a sabotage feature, but by the beginning of the official Age 3, the designers re-implemented it along with the new vacation mode option. Age 1, the beginning of the MMORPG, launched at the beginning of 2003. Age 2 followed seven months later, the Age 3 Beta Test started in February of 2004, and Age 3 officially began on July 15, 2004.

Due to the overwhelming and continually growing size of Kings of Chaos, there are now hundreds of alliances and clans, with web pages devoted solely to Kings of Chaos. On many of these sites, players have designed exclusive recruit systems. A recruit system can be anything from a simple list of unique links, or a semi-automated program tallying everyone's clicks on unique links. The purpose of an alliance is to provide support against attacks on players, growth through clicking of links, and strategies unique to each clan.

Throughout the first two ages and Age 3 Beta, Kings of Chaos remained one of the largest MMORPGs. However, several designers have recently come up with new multiplayer games including Dark Throne and Rise of Tyrants. In fact, Dennis Field based Rise of Tyrants explicitly on Kings of Chaos. While many people still sit around on computers 24 hours a day just to remain in the top of the ranks, going as far as adjusting their sleep patterns in order to log on more often, games such as these have begun pulling many devoted KoC players away. As of September 24, 2004, 70,000 less people play Kings of Chaos than in previous ages.

Kings of Chaos is a free game only due to the support of somewhat-annoying advertising and a small online store. If one wishes to get rid of the ads, they can play Zango, a special software program reducing the pop-up ads to two per day. Try out Kings of Chaos at www.kingsofchaos.com