Anno 117 price: free to try on Xbox, and what a key has cost

Anno 117: Pax Romana is free to play on Xbox until Sunday, and it is one of only two games in this weekend's Free Play Days line-up that does not ask for a Game Pass subscription first. That makes it an unusually honest way to find out whether Ubisoft Mainz's Roman city builder is for you. It does not answer the question that comes next, though, which is the Anno 117 price if you decide to keep going — and on PC that number has moved a long way since the start of October.

Playze has logged the cheapest live listing for Anno 117: Pax Romana on 32 separate days since 26 September 2026. Read on 7 November 2026, the lowest of those 32 readings is $29.16, at YUPLAY on 1 November. Every reading before 21 October sat above $34; not one since has gone above $30. The live spread is on the Anno 117: Pax Romana page — the figures above are our record, not a quote for today.

Anno's economy is still the chain of producers and warehouses the series has run on since 1998 — the Roman setting changes the goods, not the maths. (Official Steam screenshot)

Who gets it free this weekend, and who does not

Free Play Days usually means "free if you already pay Microsoft", and most of this weekend's eight games work that way: PAYDAY 3, Age of Wonders 4, Nowhere Prophet, Ball x Pit and Deceive Inc all need an Xbox Game Pass Essential, Premium or Ultimate membership. IXION is a two-hour trial.

Anno 117: Pax Romana and Crime Boss: Rockay City are the exceptions. Both are open to any Xbox member, subscription or not, and both run until Sunday 8 November. Reports differ on whether the window opened on the Thursday or the Friday; the end date is the one that matters now.

Two things worth being clear about. This is an Xbox console promotion, so it does nothing for you if you play on PC. And nothing enters your library: when Sunday passes, the install stops working unless you buy the game or subscribe to something that covers it. If you want to know which tier covers what, we went through that in Xbox Game Pass tiers explained.

The launch trailer from Ubisoft's own channel. It sells the spectacle; the game is far more about supply chains than parades.

What the Anno 117 price record actually shows

Our record for this game starts on 26 September 2026, because readings before that date are not safe to compare — the feeds then still carried Steam accounts and region-locked console keys alongside ordinary PC keys, and the public figures cannot tell them apart. Inside the clean window, the shape is clear enough.

Through late September and the first half of October the cheapest listing we could find anywhere sat in the high thirties, bouncing between official stores and key resellers without ever breaking $34. The dearest reading in the whole window is $47.58, at CJS CD Keys on 16 October. Then, from 21 October, a run of YUPLAY readings settled into the $29s and stayed there: thirteen consecutive readings to 6 November, none of them above $30.

Anno 117 came out on 12 November 2025, so it is just short of a year old. A floor in the twenties this early is quicker than Ubisoft strategy releases usually manage, and knowing the floor is already there is the single most useful thing to take into the trial with you.

Provinces are the structural change this entry makes: Latium and Albion have different needs, and the goods you ship between them are the game. (Official Steam screenshot)

Official stores, resellers, and a narrower gap than usual

There is one thing about this game's listings that is unlike most of what we track. Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Ubisoft Store all quote the same figure as each other, and the key resellers underneath them are not far below it. On a 2013 game the gap between the dearest official listing and the cheapest key is often tenfold. Here it is a matter of a few dollars.

That changes the advice. When the official and unofficial prices are close, the extra risk of a reseller buys you very little, and the case for just using a storefront you already trust gets stronger. We set out what that risk actually consists of in Are keyshops safe?, and the short version is that the cheaper the saving, the less reason there is to take it.

Two details from Steam's own listing are worth checking before you buy anywhere. The game uses Denuvo Anti-tamper, and it requires a Ubisoft account on top of whichever store you bought it from — that second one catches people out on Steam every time Ubisoft publishes something.

The night view is new to the series and does nothing mechanically, which is a fair summary of several of this entry's additions. (Official Steam screenshot)

Is it worth owning? The two verdicts disagree

This is where the free weekend earns its keep, because Anno 117 is a game the critics and the players rate very differently. Metacritic has it at 84. Steam has it at 69% positive from 12,883 reviews — "Mixed" — and the recent window is lower still at 66%.

That split is not usually a sign of a bad game. It is normally a sign of a game that does what it says and annoys the people who wanted the previous one. Anno 1800 is still the series' high-water mark for most of its audience, and if you have played it that is the fairer comparison — it is also on Game Pass. If you have not, the 69% is much less useful to you than three days of actually playing it.

What you are buying is a city builder with a province system layered on: separate regions with separate needs, goods moved between them by sea, and a difficulty that comes from logistics rather than combat. Steam lists co-op and PvP alongside the single-player campaign, as earlier Anno games did. If you like management games where the spreadsheet is the boss fight, it is firmly in that tradition.

The Dawn of the Delta update trailer, also from Ubisoft. Post-launch content is one reason the base game has drifted down in price.

Shipping between provinces is where the difficulty lives — the fights are a sideshow to the freight. (Official Steam screenshot)

What to do before Sunday

Install it on Xbox, play the opening provinces, and decide on the game rather than on the discount. That is the whole value of a no-subscription trial, and this weekend's line-up only offers it on two titles.

Military campaigns exist but are not the point; the empire is won by trade routes. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you decide you want it, note that the trial is on console and the cheap listings in our record are PC keys — the two are not interchangeable, and Microsoft Store pricing is its own problem, which we covered in how to buy Xbox games cheaper.

The bottom line

Play it free on Xbox this weekend; that part is easy. On the buying question, our record says the floor for a PC key has come down into the $29s and held there for seventeen straight readings, which is a long enough run to treat as the current level rather than a blip. There is no reason to rush, and no reason to assume the next Ubisoft sale will beat it — check the live figures on the Anno 117: Pax Romana page and buy when the number there is near the bottom of that band.

If the trial leaves you cold, the redirect is backwards rather than sideways. Anno 1800 is rated Very Positive at 81% from 32,530 Steam reviews against this entry's 69%, it is on Game Pass, and the lowest we logged for it since 26 September is $12.24, at YUPLAY on 30 October — less than half what the newer game has bottomed out at. And if strategy in general is the itch, the strategy games currently discounted is the better list to read.