Planned Release Date: September 2026

About This Game

Play on the map you already made

Mapborn is a real-time grand strategy sandbox played on your own map.

Import a hand-drawn or digital map and use it as the actual game world. The image stays visible as you place cities, create nations, set up a scenario, and add the data the simulation needs. You do not have to redraw your world as provinces or replace its original visual style.

Choose a nation, start the clock, and play.

Run a country

Manage your cities, population, treasury and research. Reform laws, recruit armies, develop important cities, negotiate treaties and decide when to go to war.

Cities are the main points of control. Population provides both economic value and soldiers, so recruiting and losing armies has a lasting cost. Prosperity falls under occupation, blockades and prolonged fighting, while poorly governed territory becomes harder to hold.

Diplomacy includes alliances, defensive pacts, trade, military access, guarantees, embargoes and rivalries. Other nations remember what you do, and aggressive expansion can push threatened countries together.

War is more than moving armies

Armies move continuously across the map rather than between hexes or provinces.

Supply comes through cities, ports and connected routes. A large army operating far from its network can slow down and lose effectiveness, while blockades, occupied cities and broken routes can disrupt an offensive.

Battles and sieges take place over time. Army composition, experience, stance, supply and supporting air or naval forces affect the result.

Capturing a city does not make it immediately productive or loyal. New territory needs administration and time to integrate. Poor administration and political pressure can lead to unrest, uprisings, mutinies and separatist movements.

Politics can change your plans

Changing a law takes time and can create domestic opposition.

Cities develop political demands based on their population, economy and circumstances. A local demand can grow into a larger movement if it is ignored, and severe political crises can end in rebellion or revolution.

War also affects domestic and international politics. Losing cities, suffering blockades or taking heavy defeats changes war support, while repeated conquest increases the threat other nations see in you.

Build your own setting

Mapborn includes tools for creating more than the map.

You can define scenarios, starting nations, cities, populations, technology, laws, units, civilizations, AI behaviour and victory conditions. A setting can be historical, alternate-history, fantasy, modern, or something made entirely for your own world.

You can also use ready-made content and Steam Workshop scenarios without building a setting yourself.

Your map provides the world. What happens after you press play is up to the simulation—and to you.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Some in-game icons were created with the assistance of generative AI during development.