Vineyard Director: Tycoon Sim

A few hectares of old vines. A harvest weeks away. A bank that wants its money back.

Vineyard Director is a real-time strategy game about building a wine estate, from one ripening block and a borrowed press into a house whose best vintage scores 98. The weather decides every year, the fruit waits for no one, and a great wine takes two years to reach the bottle.

PICK YOUR REGION
Ten of the world's great wine regions, each its own game. The Barossa Valley's century-old Shiraz and a March harvest. Napa Valley's sunshine, tourists and fearsome land prices. Marlborough's Sauvignon Blanc and Mendoza's Malbec under the Andes. Chianti's hillsides, Rioja's Gran Reservas and Bordeaux's en primeur. The Douro's terraces, Champagne's chalk and years on the lees, and the Mosel's slate cliffs and ice wine. Every region has its own grapes, climate, land and traits, and a difficulty from one to five pips.

GROW IT
Buy or lease parcels, each with its own soil, slope and warmth, and plant the variety that suits it. Prune, spray, work the canopy and thin the crop for quality. Watch for late frosts, hail, heatwaves and mildew, and put frost fans over the pockets where cold air pools.

PICK IT
The harvest is the moment of the year. Time slows while fruit is ripe. Read the five-day forecast, hire picking crews and queue each parcel at its peak. Pick too early and the wine is thin; wait for rain and the rot sets in.

MAKE IT
Crush, ferment, and choose steel, used oak or new French oak. The cellar's estimate of every wine narrows as it ages, until The Cellar Report scores it on bottling day. Rent space from the custom-crush winery down the road, then build your own crush pad, tanks, barrel cellar and bottling line. When the tanks fill up, fruit waits in the bins and loses quality.

SELL IT
Open a tasting room and set your own cellar-door price. Sign distributors, and deliver every month or lose them. Grow a wine club, open guest houses and a restaurant, and ship to importers in five countries. The wine market moves through gluts and booms; the trade will take anything, but cheaply.

BUILD A NAME
Every score moves your reputation, and reputation moves every price. Win medals at the spring show, convert to organic and then biodynamic, and climb from Garage Winery to Boutique Estate, Established Winery, Renowned House and Icon Estate.

HANDLE THE TROUBLE
Frost nights, wildfire smoke, wild boar, stuck fermentations, corked bottles, critics in the cellar, film crews and weddings. Every event is a decision with a real cost.

WHAT YOU GET
- Real-time play with pause, 1x, 2x and 4x speeds
- Ten regions, each with its own map, climate, grapes and traits, and four difficulty settings
- Five scenarios with goals, deadlines and up to three stars each
- Nineteen grape varieties, each with its own climate, ripening and taste for oak
- A living estate map: vines that change colour through the seasons, pickers in the rows, weather overhead
- Season and vintage reports, and five manage