Chris: William Goldman, who wrote so many good things, once came up with a movie about a bottle of wine. It got made, too. I gather nobody saw it. In one of Goldman’s books, he mentions that even his own kids didn’t see it. A total bomb.
Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator previewDeveloper: Broken Arms GamesPublisher: Broken Arms GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 13th May 2021 on Steam and Stadia; in autumn on mobile; and later this year on console.
In honour of this film – which I haven’t seen either – I named my first winery Goldman Wines. Fittingly, Goldman Wines has been a bit of a disaster. But it’s been fun too.
Hundred Days is a game about making wine. Last week a demo for it was available as part of Steam’s Game Festival and I gave it a bit of a tinker. It’s sort of a card game and sort of a Tetris thing. You make wine by playing cards, and once you’ve played the cards on a grid they take up a certain amount of space. You can have fun fussing around with the grids and the cards, all of which take up spaces of different shapes, to fit as many cards into the playing area as possible. It’s a nice way of creating a sense that you have more that you could do as a winemaker than you have the time or the space or the money to do. It’s the right kind of frustrating.
Outside of the Tetris/cards thing, Hundred Days takes you through the wine making process as you buy land, look after it, plant crops, tend them, and then turn the grapes into wine. It’s a tricky business, and Hundred Days makes each step feel like a choice. I like fiddling with the various elements that monitor what kind of wine I’m going to end up with. And then I like trying to sell the awful wine I’ve made to some idiots.
It’s charming, actually, a lovely game with a nice layout and presentation and a witty script. I’m already trying to learn how to keep the money coming in, which means making wines that people will like, and successfully getting the good stuff into the bottle. A movie about a bottle of wine sounds like a bit of a yawn, then, even if William Goldman is writing it. But a game? It works.