Here's what you need to know about Hundred Days - Napa Valley

One of the top ten games I played last year just recently released a new expansion. Hundred Days, the winery management simulator, now has a new set of challenges and wine varieties to represent California's wine landscape, and it's a welcome addition to an already great game.

To acquire this expansion, players must first spend $2.99 to fully unlock the Napa Valley menu waiting for them on the game's new start screen. From there, you can choose to play in the open-ended endless mode or embark on challenges that ask you to achieve certain milestones within a turn limit. These modes already exist within the base version of Hundred Days, but the new wine varieties, climate considerations, and even the challenges themselves are all new in this expansion.

If you want to get a look at how this might change things up, feel free to inspect the video impressions posted with this piece. Overall, I would say that the game doesn't feel all that different so much as a bunch of little goalposts have been shifted. As a result, it adds a good amount of variety for players who have grown tired of starting games already knowing the best ways to cultivate all of the Piedmont wine varieties and would like to discover new methods for producing different wines. Outside of that, it mostly feels like more of the same.

In some ways, that's great. A big part of the appeal of Hundred Days to me is how laid-back and incremental it is. That said it would've been nice to see some additional story (the base game's is surprisingly charming!) or perhaps a new mode altogether. This is all to say that this Napa Valley expansion will probably only do anything for you if you are hungry for more of what Hundred Days has already offered you, as opposed to refreshing the game in a way that would draw in new players or respond to any criticisms.