Wanderburg, the medieval action roguelike from Randwerk, was officially named the Most Entertaining game at Gamescom 2026, beating Bad Magpie, Denshattack!, Escape From Duckov, and There Are No Ghosts at the Grand to the title. Now, less than two weeks later, it launches into Steam Early Access today.
Published by Sidekick Publishing, Wanderburg puts you in control of a roaming fortress that gets bigger by devouring just about everything smaller than it. Villages, sheep, enemy castles, they’re all potential food, and the more you consume, the more your little castle on wheels grows into something considerably harder to ignore.
Eat the Village, Then Worry About the Castle
You begin each run relatively small, which isn’t ideal when the countryside is filled with other castles looking to do exactly the same thing you are. Thankfully, villages are much less threatening.
Rolling through them lets your fortress consume buildings and expand, while wandering flocks and smaller strongholds can also contribute to your growth. Eventually you’ll be big enough to start picking fights with enemy castles, defeat them, and continue turning your own fortress into an enormous moving siege engine.
Being bigger doesn’t necessarily mean you’re finished building either. New modules can be attached to your castle as it expands, letting you add cannons, explosives, arcane towers filled with wizards, and other siege machinery. Different combinations open up different builds, while unlockable vehicles, artifacts, and captains add more options between runs.
By the time things really get going, two castles rolling towards each other starts looking less like medieval warfare and more like a pair of heavily armed battleships that somehow took a wrong turn and ended up on land.
Somehow, the Bicycle Knights Aren’t the Weirdest Part
The medieval setting gets increasingly loose with the history books from there. Steam-powered siege engines can roll alongside magical artillery, enormous castles fire broadsides at one another, and knights have apparently discovered bicycles.
There’s also more waiting beyond the grasslands seen in the demo. Randwerk has already shown off a desert biome with new enemies and bosses, while the Early Access version includes multiple biomes and difficulty levels to work through.
Runs are designed around experimenting with different combinations and finding builds capable of becoming completely ridiculous. Randwerk isn’t particularly worried about players breaking things either. In fact, finding the combinations that can “break or completely devour the game” is one of the reasons the studio says it wants players involved throughout Early Access.
Winning Gamescom Was Just the Warm-Up
Wanderburg already had plenty of attention heading into launch. Its free Steam demo currently sits at Very Positive with more than 1,300 user reviews. The official Gamescom award is decided through both an expert jury and community voting, making that Most Entertaining win a fairly impressive endorsement for a game that hadn’t even reached Early Access yet.
Now everyone else gets to find out what the fuss is about. Randwerk currently expects Wanderburg to remain in Early Access for around six to 12 months. More content, variety, polish, and balancing are planned during that time, with player feedback helping decide how the game develops. For today, though, the gates are finally open.