Up to four players are able to play the game at the same time and the "castles" in the four corners of the screen are brick walls that can be destroyed with a flaming ball.

The prototype version of Warlords was called "Castles and Kings" and was housed in a large four-player "Sprint 4-like" cabinet.

Each castle is an L-shaped wall distinguished by a different color, each containing and protecting a Warlord icon (a crown for player-controlled Kings, a dark lord helmet for computer-controlled Black Knights).

The weapons for accomplishing this are spinning fireballs which bounce off anything they touch and destroy chunks of a castle wall on contact.

Fireballs can be caught, held, and thrown by shields for greater hitting force, via a "Power stone" button, but at the cost of slowly deteriorating the player's own walls.

[4][5][6] The coin-op group developed the arcade version from the same "Castles and Kings" concept, adding and changing features to make the game more suitable for coin-operated play.

Arkie Award judges characterized the game as "something really new and different in 'Pong'-style designs", and commented that Warlords "delivers plenty of on-screen excitement".

[15] In 2006, Darrell Spice Jr. released Medieval Mayhem, a homebrew Atari 2600 game inspired by Warlords.

[16] In 1999, Working Designs included an 8 player remake of Warlords as an Easter Egg on the "Making of" disc in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete.

The remake is titled "Lords of Lunar" by Timon Marmex Trezpacz and is accessed by pressing (up, down, left, right, triangle, start) as soon as the "Making of" video begins.