Wanderburg's castle-on-wheels roguelike reaches 150,000 owners in three days
Berlin co-op Randwerk's castle-on-wheels roguelike was picked up by 150,000 people in three days, and is now patching its Early Access build almost daily.
Wanderburg, a roguelike in which you drive a medieval castle on wheels and eat everything smaller than it, entered Steam Early Access on 8 September. Three days later its Berlin developer Randwerk and publisher Sidekick Publishing said more than 150,000 people had picked the game up, over 800 streamers had played it, and it had peaked at 9,900 concurrent players on 10 September.
The launch followed a gamescom award for "Most Entertaining", announced by the team on 4 September. It is also a launch that has not gone entirely to plan, and the studio has been unusually open about both halves of that story.
What Wanderburg actually is
Each run starts with a small moving fortress on an open, procedurally generated map. Villages flee and enemy castles hunt, while villages, wandering flocks and smaller fortresses all feed your growth. The official press kit pitches it as "a fresh take on the survivors-formula with more active gameplay", borrowing from Spore, Agar.io and Sid Meier's Pirates!, and the influence of the last one is obvious when a fortress turns side-on and fires a broadside.
The build system is organised around the shape of the castle. Weapon modules attach to the front, sides or back, so a front cannon, a barracks on the flanks that spawns troops and a hammer-wielding companion at the rear each occupy their own slot, with an automatic attack and a triggered ability apiece. Modules level up during a run in the survivors-like manner, the castle itself grows larger after each boss, and progress between runs unlocks new modules, vehicles, artifacts and captains who change the rules, from a pirate who is vulnerable to enemy cannons to a tank-like captain whose speed boost regenerates more slowly.
A worker cooperative with an award-winning debut
Randwerk describes itself on its own site as the first game studio in Germany to use the cooperative legal form, the Genossenschaft. Each member owns a share and has one vote regardless of how much money they put in, and profit is either reinvested or split evenly. Its founders, Friedrich Beyer, Till Freitag and Johannes Knop, met at university, where a joint project became their first commercial game, ABRISS: Build to Destroy. It went on to sell on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox and won the German Computer Game Award for best graphics in 2023.
Wanderburg is built in Unity 6 with support from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg media fund and the DE:HIVE institute in Berlin. Randwerk announced its partnership with Sidekick Publishing, a fellow Berlin company based in Spandau, when the demo went live in February. Sidekick says it grew out of the creator agency INSTINCT3, in an ecosystem co-founded alongside the German streamer HandOfBlood, and that its model is to shape games for streamability. The 800-streamer figure at launch is the clearest sign of that approach at work.
The road to launch, by the developer's own numbers
Every figure below comes from Randwerk's own posts on the game's Steam page:
- July 2025: more than 70,000 wishlists in the six weeks after the store page went live.
- December 2025: more than 126,000 players joined the first public playtest, which ran from 4 December and was extended by a week.
- February 2026 Steam Next Fest: the #7 most played demo out of roughly 3,500 games, with over 200,000 demo players and a 90 percent positive demo rating.
- March 2026: more than 400,000 wishlists in total, according to the studio's Next Fest recap.
- gamescom 2026: the award for Most Entertaining, confirmed on the official gamescom award page.
The schedule moved more than once. An October 2025 roadmap targeted Early Access for the first half of 2026; in May the studio pushed it to "this summer" to allow more balancing and polish before a closed playtest, and the date finally settled on 8 September.
A rougher first week
The launch build has not matched the demo's reception. As of 15 September the Steam store lists 2,087 user reviews, 1,645 of them positive, for a "Mostly Positive" rating, below the 90 percent the studio reported for the demo. Randwerk retired that demo on launch day, saying the game had changed so much since March that it no longer represented what was on sale.
The team's launch recap acknowledges that performance "isn't where we want it to be yet", and the patch cadence shows the pressure. Five hotfixes, versions 0.9.6 to 0.9.10, shipped between 8 and 12 September. They fixed enemy wheel bugs and a softlock on the Rare Artifact screen, cut the Dark Tower's health on the lowest difficulty from 12,000 to 10,000 and softened penalties on captains such as Kapitalstus Maximus and the Duelist. Version 0.9.10 also added an extra reroll for every six modules or artifacts unlocked, which addresses a recurring complaint in the store reviews that unlocking everything clutters the upgrade pool. A separate update cut the grind on stat-based achievements, reducing the top distance tier from 10,000 km to 1,000 km.
“Of course, the journey hasn’t been completely smooth. Performance isn’t where we want it to be yet, and we’re working on it.”Team Randwerk and Sidekick Publishing, in the Wanderburg Early Access recap on Steam, 11 September 2026
Price, platforms and what comes next
- Released: 8 September 2026, Steam Early Access
- Price: $14.99, with a 35 percent introductory discount to $9.74 until 22 September
- Platform: Windows PC via Steam; the press kit lists PC as the only platform
- Languages: 16, with full controller support and mouse-only and keyboard-only options
Randwerk's Early Access notes on the store page say it expects Wanderburg to stay in Early Access for six to 12 months and that it "might increase the price" as content is added, which makes the introductory window the cheapest the game is likely to be. The current build already includes multiple biomes and difficulty levels, and the studio has promised a public Early Access roadmap soon.
For anyone deciding now, the honest summary is that the core loop of growing a fortress by eating the map is the reason 150,000 people picked it up, and the meta progression around it is the part still being rebuilt in public, one hotfix a day.
The time has come, the moment you've been waiting for... The WANDERBURG Playtest is live on Steam! From today until December 11th!🔥 We are excited to see how you like it and we want your feedback!🏰
— Randwerk (@randwerk), 4 December 2025, announcing the playtest on X
Official links
Sam writes about small studios and the games they ship against the odds, and turns the hardest parts of them into guides that get to the point.
