https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35721
--- Comment #15 from Linus Unnebäck linus@folkdatorn.se --- Okay, just figured out a big piece of the puzzle. There is something in wine, that at least on macOS affects Black & White. But it doesn't affect the game itself, it affects the installer.
If I run the installer in Wineskin with wine 1.7.5, then copy the entire wine-prefix out and use it with wine 3.6 from Homebrew, then I can successfully run the game!
I'm going to try and investigate the difference between the two prefixes, but my guess is that it has something do to with the registry. I tried to debug the issue using +relay and it seems to crash after reading something from the registry... I'm not 100% about this though :)