Mini Motorways ‘Rome’ Map Update Lands Free This Winter 2026

Dinosaur Polo Club will release a free Rome Map update for Mini Motorways in winter 2026, the Wellington, New Zealand studio confirmed today at The MIX Fall Game Showcase. The map will arrive on Apple Arcade, PC and Mac via Steam, and Nintendo Switch (the game’s three current platforms), and adds a new land-and-waterway design challenge set in modern Rome, Italy. The MIX Fall showcase is the same event that gave us today’s other indie reveal, the Shrek 2 Remastered Xbox Store leak.

The announcement lands on Mini Motorways’ 7-year anniversary. The minimalist traffic-management sim launched on Steam on July 20, 2021, after debuting on Apple Arcade in September 2019 and on Nintendo Switch in May 2022. The studio says Mini Motorways has more than nine million players across its lifetime, and the game now sits at 25 playable cities as of September 2026 per Wikipedia. The Rome map joins that list as the next city-planner playground, with a fresh round of achievements, daily challenges, weekly challenges, city challenges, and Continue in Creative Mode (per the press release).

Dinosaur Polo Club is the Wellington-based studio of brothers Peter and Robert Curry, founded in 2013. They’re best known for the BAFTA-nominated Mini Metro, which they made in collaboration with Disasterpeace and Jamie Churchman, and the broader Mini Collection has become a touchstone for relaxed city-building design. The Rome update will be free for every existing player; the studio has not changed the game’s $9.99/€8.57 price tag on Steam, and Apple Arcade access stays free for subscribers. Critically, the studio has held that price for seven years across the 9-million-player catalog.

Rome’s twist, beyond the espresso-and-cobblestones aesthetic, is the river. Past Mini Motorways maps split between coastal and landlocked terrain; Rome’s Tiber-side layout gives the studio a clean reason to lean into waterway routing as a design layer. Connecting across the river is going to be a different puzzle from feeding Hong Kong’s harbor tunnels or threading Istanbul’s two-continent traffic. The release is positioned as a regular free update, not a paid expansion.

The MIX Fall showcase included a new gameplay trailer for the Rome map. Dinosaur Polo Club did not name a specific day in winter 2026; the previous map updates have rolled out without fixed dates, and the studio has stuck to seasonal windows since the 2021 launch.

Mini Motorways has run on a free-update cadence for seven years without paid DLC, which is rare for a sim at its price point ($9.99/€8.57 on Steam) and at its Metacritic range (87 PC, 81 Switch, 80 iOS, OpenCritic 87% recommend). The Rome map lands at a moment when the cozy-tycoon space is crowded (Townscaper, two Point Hospital successors, plenty of Apple Arcade competition), so a high-profile city-with-river hook is the cleanest way to keep the player base engaged without a price change. For comparison, see how indie studios lean into free content cadence elsewhere: the DayZ creator’s Brutal engine also went free for the community this week, though that’s an open-source framework, not a content drop. Expect a Steam and Apple Arcade simultaneous drop, since Apple Arcade is the studio’s home subscriber per the press release. Mini Motorways’ Switch port also makes it one of the easier free-map-update wins on Nintendo’s platform this winter, alongside titles like Cult of the Lamb on Switch 2 on October 22.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report