KITAMAE
Empire of Sails
Browser-based · Phone or desktop · Free during beta
Mederu OÜ — Tallinn, Estonia
The Bloomberg Terminal existed in 1850. You just didn't know it yet.
KITAMAE isn't a sailing game. There are no sails to trim, no ships to steer. You run a maritime trading house in 19th-century Japan — fleets at sea, prices in every port, weather over the Sea of Japan — all from a single terminal. Glance at it the way you'd glance at the markets. On your phone, between meetings. On the train home.
One screen, everything at once. Your personal terminal — rank, standing, line of credit. Your fleet. The day's demand alerts. A watchlist of commodities you've been tracking. Performance metrics climbing toward your next rank. Total profit, total distance, ports visited, voyages closed. Every number a Bloomberg trader watches by reflex — in a 19th-century world.
Every port carries its own dossier. A monochrome image of the harbor. A historical brief, written like an editorial entry — what made this place matter, in plain prose. The current sea state: wave height, wind direction, weather. Your accumulating affinity with the local merchants. Donate to the shrine often enough and you become a known patron. The terminal remembers.
A color matrix of the entire economy. Ports down the y-axis. Commodities across the x. Green cells are cheap, red are expensive, gray is fair value. The whole Sea of Japan in a single glance — patterns leap out the moment you see them. Hakodate's herring meal green against Osaka's deep red. The seasonal swings in lacquerware. The chronic surpluses of rapeseed oil. Every voyage a captain logs fills in another cell.
Every commodity in the system is a historical good. Tap any item and the terminal opens its dossier: a museum-quality image of the artifact, the cultural and economic context of its production, the trade logistics that moved it along the Sea of Japan coast in the 19th century. KITAMAE is, quietly, an encyclopedia of Japanese material culture.
A 24-month price history is one tap away. Toggle between intraday, weekly, and monthly views. Spot the seasonal swings, the post-storm spikes, the slow grinds toward equilibrium. The terminal speaks the language of every financial trader you've ever met — but the underlying assets are rice, herring meal, and lacquerware.
Three things the screenshots can't quite show.
No static price tables. Every price is computed in real time from base value, port rank, production modifiers, current inventory ratios, price elasticity, and seasonal coefficients. Over 1,000 captains buy and sell into the same shared market — every transaction moves the price for everyone.
No click-to-arrive. Wind direction, current vectors, and wave height affect every voyage in real time. Your cargo layout matters: heavy roof tiles and granite at the bottom for stability, light kimono fabric on top. Miscalculate your ballast, and a winter storm will capsize your entire fleet.
Profit is a means, not the goal. Trade honestly with a port's merchants, year after year, and they come to know your name. Donate to shrines, invest in struggling harbors, and your Toku rises — and the kami of the coast take note when storms come. Commission a stone torii gate for a harbor shrine, and your name is carved into it permanently. You are not just trading. Your name takes root on this coast.
183 ports. Every one of them real. Every cargo historically sourced.
Each port in KITAMAE carries the goods it actually traded in the 19th century. Sakata moves rice and safflower. Hakodate deals in herring and kelp. Tsuruga handles textiles from Kyoto. The geography is real, the trade goods are real, and seasonal advantages rotate — there is no single best route.
All ports are verifiable locations on the Sea of Japan coast.
From a borrowed boat to a fleet of your own.
Eight ranks. The actual hierarchy of a kitamaebune crew. You start as a cook's apprentice on someone else's ship. Every rank above is earned — at sea, in trade, year by year.
RK_01
炊
かしき
Apprentice
The cook. Every fleet owner started here.
RK_02
水主
かこ
Deckhand
Your hands begin to know the work.
RK_03
若衆
わかしゅ
Able Seaman
Skilled enough to be left alone.
RK_04
親父
おやじ
Boatswain
The deck moves at your word.
RK_05
表仕
おもてし
Navigator
Wind, current, star — your instruments.
RK_06
知工
ちく
Purser
The trade lives in your ledger.
RK_07
船頭
せんどう
Master
The ship answers to one voice. Yours.
RK_08
船主
ふなぬし
Fleet Owner
You no longer sail. You decide who sails.
Ownership is where you arrive — not where you begin.
This hierarchy ran on every kitamaebune from the 1660s to the 1890s.
The winter Sea of Japan has sunk better captains than you.
Under the hood: real atmospheric modeling — pressure systems, wind vectors, wave height, and the Tsushima Current — drives every voyage in the simulation.
In KITAMAE, the sea is the same — a live weather simulation, built from historical records of the 19th-century coast. Low-pressure systems form and dissipate. Storm fronts traverse the map in real time. Winds shift hour by hour. The Tsushima Current is plotted into every routing calculation.
From November to March, the northwest monsoon turns the coast into water no benzai-sen was built for — waves overrun the hulls; ships that loaded their ballast wrong go down without a witness. The brave sail anyway, and find every port paying scarcity prices. The patient wait the season out in harbor — repairing what the autumn damaged, turning idle hands to rope and straw mats, the off-season trades that kept a kitamaebune crew alive through the dark months.
A game that wants to send you to Japan — properly.
The ports in KITAMAE stand on the Japanese coast today. They line the Sea of Japan from Hakodate to Osaka, just as they did in 1850 — but most go unvisited, invisible to the railway-centric tourism that funnels millions toward Tokyo and Kyoto and nowhere else.
KITAMAE makes you remember the names: Sakata, Tsuruga, Tadotsu — not Shibuya. BOREAL, our editorial magazine, tells you what those names actually carry — the crafts still made, the foods still eaten, the people still working there. Together, they point toward a Japan the railway doesn't reach.
Play the routes. Read the ports. Walk the coast.
Shifting perspectives through gamification.
Mederu OÜ is a small independent studio based in Tallinn, on the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea. We design games as instruments — for changing how people see, for redirecting attention, for putting overlooked things back on the map.
KITAMAE is our debut title. Our attention runs across scales — from the quiet frictions of daily life to the slow, complex problems that span the world. We start with Japan's port towns.
The first 1,000 captains.
Apply today. Get access in waves. Founder status is forever.
Submit the form below. A confirmation email arrives within minutes (double opt-in). You'll see your queue position and receive an invitation to the Discord community, where you can talk to other captains-in-waiting
No cost. No cap on applications.
The first 100–300 captains receive Founder invitations. The Founder badge appears on your account, and the beta access link arrives by email. Founder-only Discord channels open: #bug-reports, #feedback, #help.
You sail with a direct line to the developers.
Subsequent waves of Founder invitations go out, each carrying several hundred captains. The Founding cohort grows toward 1,000 captains over the following weeks. Order broadly follows application order — the earlier you applied, the earlier you sail.
You're part of the Founding cohort — the first 1,000 captains who showed up before anyone knew if this was going to work. Some mark of that stays with you in the official release. How we surface it in-game is something we're still designing, and we'll be transparent as it takes shape. Early access to new features continues after launch.
Your application has been received.
You're in the queue — we'll be in touch when your Wave invitation is ready.
While you wait, join the community →A few more things.
Can I stream, record, or create content from the beta?
Yes. Beta gameplay can be streamed, recorded, edited, and monetized. We only ask that you don't dox other players, harass anyone, or spread misinformation. Tag #kitamae if you'd like us to find you.
What languages will the beta support?
English at launch. Japanese, German, and French roll out in the months following Wave 1. The Terminal UI is designed to work in all four from day one.
How do I withdraw my application or delete my data?
Email privacy@kitamae.app from the address you applied with. Withdrawal happens within 30 days, in line with GDPR. No questions asked.
Will there be a beta wipe / progress reset?
We're planning to reset in-game progress — fleets, ledgers, capital — at least once before the official release. The economy will shift during the beta, and a clean start is often the only way to keep it healthy for everyone. Some elements may carry forward depending on how the systems stabilize, but assume a reset by default. Your status as one of the first 1,000 captains stays with you in some form — exactly how, we're still designing. Any reset is announced well in advance, never silently.
Where is Mederu OÜ based, and what law applies?
Tallinn, Estonia. The beta is governed by Estonian law. EU consumer protection and GDPR apply throughout.
FOUNDING BETA OPEN
The first 1,000 slots are waiting.