Merano · A city-builder for Apple Silicon Macs
A valley in 1800.
Two hundred years
are yours to build.
Start with a handful of settlers on the floor of a narrow alpine valley, with almost nothing. Two hundred years later you can still walk that valley, and now there is a town in it. That's the game.
The real valley, drawn from real satellite and survey data.
The Passer's course, the terraces of Schenna and the walls of the Texelgruppe are built from the province's own survey of the land and from the Copernicus satellites, so the river runs where it runs and the larches stand where the forest stands.
Snow caps the peaks in winter and melts into the river in spring. The larch turns gold in autumn. Speed the years up sixteenfold to watch a vineyard mature, or slow them down to follow one person home. The trees do not sway any faster when you do.
A photograph from above the town, and the game's camera on the same terrace.
The picture on the left was taken by Merano Studio in the gardens of Trauttmansdorff Castle in the spring of 2019. The one on the right is the game, its camera placed on the same terrace with the same lens, two centuries earlier. The mountains have not moved. Drag the line.
Everyone has a name, and a mother.
Josef and Maria, their children and their children's children. The people of Merano are born, grow up, marry, take a trade, grow old and die, and the house passes to the next of them. Click anyone and you learn who they are, how old, what they are carrying and where they are going.
No one is a unit. A village of forty is forty lives you can follow home.
Built the way they were built.
Every building follows a source from the Burggrafenamt: the Paarhof with its house and its barn, the smokehouse, the granary on its stone legs, the lime kiln. They go up stage by stage, from the trestles and the ring footing to the shingles, and the people you sent to build them do the work in front of you.
The lime coat ages. The shingles silver. A house you raised in 1803 still looks like itself in 1840.
Strawberries, not food.
Nothing in Merano is an abstract bucket. The town runs on rye and hay, on juniper berries and smoked trout, on lime burnt in the kiln and charcoal from the clamp at the wood's edge. A pedlar brings what the valley cannot make and takes what it has too much of.
Send a crew to fell a tree and they walk there, limb it, buck it, split it and carry the billets back, trip after trip. Send the herd up to the alp on St George's Day and it comes home by Martinmas.
From the farming valley to the spa town to the railway.
The game begins in 1800 in a valley of farmers and ends in 2000 with a town. Each era has its own buildings, its own trades and its own weather of ideas, and what the valley learns in one is what it builds in the next.
The Farming Valley
1800 to 1836. The Hof, the fields and the hay, the herd on the alp in summer, the pig at Martinmas, and a schoolhouse where the valley's knowledge begins. The first era, and the one that ships first.
The Spa Town
The Habsburg years. Meran becomes a cure town: the promenades, the Kurhaus, the villas on the slopes, visitors from Vienna who stay the winter. The railway reaches the valley.
The Century
Two wars, a border that moves, apples and wine, and the town you can walk through today. The later eras come to the game as free updates.
Four valleys, each the real one.
A board is a real stretch of the South Tyrol, its ground and its forest from the survey and the satellite. Merano is the first. Val Gardena, the upper Vinschgau under the Ortler and Prags with its lake stand beside it.
MeranoThe Passer valley 
Val GardenaThe Dolomites 
VinschgauUnder the Ortler 
PragsThe lake
In the making, on Apple Silicon.
Merano is written for Apple Silicon Macs and nothing else, with Metal and Apple's own frameworks and no engine bought in, to show what a native game on these machines can be. It runs at sixty frames a second at full resolution on an M1 Max.
It is in development. When the first era is complete it will come to the Mac App Store as one purchase, with no in-app purchases, and the later eras will follow as free updates. The pictures on this page are the game as it stands today, rendered by the game itself.
- Apple Silicon MacsmacOS 15 or later. No Intel, no iOS.
- One purchaseNo in-app purchases, no subscription.
- Three languagesEnglish, German and Italian, as the valley speaks.
- Saved gamesYour town is yours to keep across every update.
A note when there is something to see.
A new slice of the game, a devlog, the beta when it opens. Nothing else.
Your address goes to Merano Studio and no one else. Every note has a link to leave.