Crafting

Turning things into other things

Crafting is what makes a pile of resources into a plan. On its own, three wood is just three wood; with a recipe in front of you it is most of a boat, and suddenly the wood is worth trading for. That is why crafting turns up in so many games with so few components: it costs one sheet of paper and it gives every item a reason to be wanted.

The tricky part at a real table is the bookkeeping, and specifically the half-done craft: somebody hands over two of the three things, gets distracted, and nobody can remember what was paid. Here it cannot happen. Crafting takes every ingredient and gives the output, or it takes nothing at all and says what is still missing. There is no state in between.

Discovery, and why hiding a recipe is fun

With discovery on, the book lists what can be made but not what goes into it, and the only way to find out is to hold some things and try. It turns a resource game into a puzzle, and the first successful craft becomes an announcement rather than an errand. It also gives the table something to talk about, which a plain recipe list never does.

The obvious lesson use is chemistry. Make the ingredients elements and the outputs compounds, turn discovery on, and a class has to reason about what combines with what rather than reading it off a sheet. It works the same way for word building, for fractions that add to a whole, and for anything else where two known things make a third.

Piles of its own

This page keeps its own piles rather than reading the inventory tray. Sharing one store between two pages sounds convenient and would mean this page had to claim, in the privacy list, that it stores something another page owns. Keeping them separate keeps that list honest, and running both side by side works perfectly well: the inventory as the store cupboard, this as the workbench.

There is no separate list of item types either. An ingredient exists because a recipe mentions it, so writing a recipe is the only setting up there is. For collecting things into named groups rather than combining them, the set collection board is the page. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

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