Season 1
Marmalade
The story of Marmalade
The home veld
Coming to Mac
Coming to Mac
Real-time strategy for macOS
Win cows one at a time, keep them fed and watered, and fight the bulls who want them.
Drag to turn
The bulls
Campaign
Season 1
The story of Marmalade
The home veld
Season 2
The story of Dust
The Highveld and the Kalahari
Season 3
The story of Ash, as the coast tells it
The Wild CoastHow to play is an interactive lesson on the home veld. The narrator teaches one step at a time and ticks each off as you do it.
Background
Marmalade and his rivals are made up. The cattle aren't: the herds in the game behave the way Nguni do, and their history runs through the campaign.
Cattle came south through the continent with the people who herded them, and settled in the south-east. Over time the land made them Nguni.
An estimated four to five million Nguni lived in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
There were far fewer, and confiscation and rinderpest followed.
A small herd was saved, and there are millions again.
Breed history from Ed Schroeder's The Nguni of the Makhathini Flats and The return of the indigenous Sanga Nguni of southern Africa, used with his permission.
Gameplay
Seen from above. You only give orders to bulls. Cows go where their needs take them and stay with a bull they're fond of. Leave them hungry, or wander too far, and another bull will take them.
The veld
Maps are 480 m across and grow from a biome and a seed, so the same seed always gives the same map. Rivers wind to the sea, villages sit on packed earth with dirt roads between them, and zebra, springbok, wildebeest, ostriches and warthogs share the grass.
Golden grass, rocky koppies with quiver trees, and flat-topped sandstone kranse.
Green grass and thick coastal bush, pale beaches and dunes, rocky headlands and the sea.
Long red dunes, sparse dry grass, camel thorns, more salt pans and fewer waterholes.
In development
Three seasons across the Highveld, the Kalahari and the Wild Coast, and an open Skirmish game on any map.