Hundred Days Winemaking Game
Build your virtual winemaking empire
I'm sure we've all had the fantasy of leaving our day jobs behind and moving to a lush countryside to start a winemaking business. Well soon we'll be able to live out that fantasy, although virtually.
Hundred Days is a new game soon to be released by the Italy-based developers Broken Arm Games. It's is a simulator style game with a slight puzzle element, allowing players to build and scale a winemaking business from scratch.
The game consists of 4 main elements: the vines, warehouse, winery and the playing board & cards. The player is presented with certain cards in each round and must fit these on to the board in order for that card to execute. So, for example, the player is presented with 3 cards which have various sizes and shapes and represent various steps in the winemaking process. These need to be executed in the right order and at the right time. As the business grows you need to manage more of these at the same time. You start with a limited size board and can purchase more squares on the board and so allowing you to fit more cards on it at one time. It's not the easiest to explain in text so I would highly recommend playing the demo a couple of times or watching the trailer to get a feel for the gameplay.
There's a lot of features in the game and it allows you to control the winemaking process right from growing grapes to selling the wine. It's a game where there's always something to do and think about. Players can:
Cultivate different types of vine and choose grape varieties depending on the soil characteristics
Manage work in the vineyard such as pruning and harvesting
Apply treatments to the vines depending on the type of disease
Check the state of ripeness of the grapes and decide when to harvest
Follow the winemaking processes and develop the characteristics of the wines
Select the yeasts and bacteria used during fermentation
Age the wines in different ways and for different lengths of time
Customise bottles by choosing their shape, colour, cork type or screw cap
Create a sales network and adapt the characteristics of the wine to the type of customer
Manage marketing and social activities to increase the reputation of the company.
The game is built on Unity which gives it great looking graphics and good performance. It also makes the game really easy for the developers to port on to a broad range of platforms such as Xbox and Playstation in the future. It will be released on 13th May, initially on PC and Mac via Steam, and on Google Stadia, with consoles coming later.
Having just played the demo I think this is a really fun and interesting game. It does teach you about the wine making process but the education feels secondary which is nice, otherwise it might feel like being back in school. It allows you to play around and add your own touch with every decision you make having a genuine impact. It provides a good mix between the simulation and puzzle genres with it definitely be more of a simulator than a puzzle game which I think is spot on.
I'm looking forward to the release and will no doubt be spending my weekends and evenings building my virtual wine empire.