Crafts Fair Out (Feb 20 2026)

This post is going up in the morning rather than night since I already finished writing. But it’s also because, after just 5 weeks of development, the game is now done. Also a reminder that, even though it’s an online game, I took steps to have the game work in solitaire too, you can play the game purely by yourself (as long as you read the rulebook).

One of the biggest tasks left was figuring out a logo and name for the game. Actually I figured out the logo first, I wanted something involving the level icon and the 4 tokens. Since there are 6 levels and 4 tokens, it would be cool if the name of the game was a 6-letter word plus a 4-letter word. And I realized that Crafts Fair is a perfect name that even matches the flavor, since they’re an actual thing, and it’s a place where you sell homemade items to customers. I got really lucky here, I don’t know what else I could have done for a name if that wasn’t an option.

One thing about the game is that the general gameplay encourages hoarding. In other words, keeping all your cards and tokens around for the entire game and saving all your scoring until the end. While I’m ok if that’s the best strategy some of the time, I think it’s more fun if you’re scoring cards and tokens multiple times during the game instead of just waiting for one big turn. The way to at least reduce this from happening was to have some Twists that rewarded you for having money (now you can’t just stay at $0 for the whole game) and penalizing having certain tokens (you can avoid the penalties by selling those tokens).

I think the game is great, but probably the main criticism one could make is that there’s no engine building. In many card games, your turns start out weak, and then accomplish more over time as you get more abilities. In this game though, your turns are always the same. The only way to make substantial progress is through the Twists, and they don’t really count as something you do each turn. In theory I could have the customers give you abilities when you satisfy them, but that would be more complicated, and I’d have to redo the flavor. But I think I can live without it, there’s still plenty of planning you have to do, and combos to work towards. 

Another thought is, does Crafts Fair want a story? Writing a story for my games sounds like a hopeless task, since they’re basically all mechanics-first and have zero story at all. I can’t imagine what I would even write for All Shapes and Sizes and Relentless Waves. However, Crafts Fair does have a small amount of story and flavor (of selling tokens to customers). I did also give Randomly Generated RPG a few paragraphs of story, and I think that story turned out great because it’s just jokes about why the game has no flavor. But I don’t think I can repeat those kinds of jokes for every game I make. Anyways, maybe there’s something funny I can come up with in the future, but that’s not gonna get in the way of me releasing the game. 

Finally, speaking of Randomly Generated RPG, I think I can make it even better and simpler. Each emotion in the game has 2 rules associated with it, and maybe I can get rid of that. They’re just super effective against each other and that’s it. Instead, there can be 2 Rules each game that change things up, for both players and enemies, and the current rules on the emotions are now moved there instead. I think the only downside is some enemies are built around emotions (like the Bat purposefully makes itself Sad) and if Sad does nothing special, then those enemies look weird / may need changing. It’s also possible I should just drop the cheats and challenges and have some of them be Rules instead. But I think it'll be worth the effort, and will hopefully be the last time I ever have to make major changes to this almost 2 year old game.