Sessanta Passi

Sessanta Passi is a calm real-time strategy game on a living isometric map of a real road: the Tratturo Magno, the royal sheep track that ran 244 km from the Basilica of Collemaggio in L'Aquila to the Chiesa delle Croci in Foggia. It is dawn on 29 September, the feast of San Michele. Your flock is already on the tratturo below Collemaggio, split into three morre, each following its own shepherd. Tap a shepherd to select him and his morra, tap the ground to send them. Touch and hold to station one of the white mastiffs, or to pitch the evening stazzo. Swipe to look along the road. The tratturo is sixty Neapolitan passi wide, about 111 metres, and the flock must walk it without trampling the saffron of Navelli, the olive groves or the fresh-sown wheat. Every stray in the fields costs you the farmers' goodwill. Drive the flock hard and it loses condition; let it graze and the day runs out. Rain raises the rivers; fog sits on the pass; wind pushes the flock towards the fields; carts, pilgrims and rival flocks share the road; at dusk the Apennine wolves come out. Your company has names and habits. Zi' Nicola, the old vergaro, reads tomorrow's weather off Gran Sasso and will not ford a river after rain. Antonio the casaro makes pecorino at every stazzo and tends lame ewes. Rocco, fifteen, fetches strays faster than anyone but is jumpy after dark. Bianca keeps to the windward side, Brigante chases wolves far too far, Neve sleeps all day and guards best at night. The road teaches them: eighteen lessons change how they work. Each leg is one day, about four minutes, ending at a stazzo beside a tratturo church. Fourteen legs take you through the Aterno valley, the Navelli plateau, the Tirino valley, Forca di Penne, the Pescara valley, Lanciano, the Osento mouth, the Vasto plain, the Trigno crossing into Molise, Termoli, the Fortore at Civitate and Foggia, where the flock is counted. Then the spring return begins on 8 May, with lambs. The shepherd's notebook opens page by page as you reach each place: the Regia Dogana of 1447, the sixty-passi width, the tratturo churches, the vraccale and the white mastiff, the stazzo and the posta, the two feasts of San Michele, and D'Annunzio's “I pastori” with an English reading. Entirely offline. No account, no ads, no purchases.