A cozy craft game. You're the new goldsmith of a parish in the Minho, in the north of Portugal, through the twelve months of 1911. You make real traditional jewellery, one decision at a time, for villagers and for the folklore that still walks the lanes at night.
In development for iPad and Mac. The demo runs in your browser: best on a laptop or an iPad, with sound on.
The demo is one commission. The parish's benzedeira brings 3.4 g of her own gold and wants a ring with a good red coral by Sunday. Ten steps, from the counter to the moment she tries it on, and every coin you spend is counted.
Or jump straight to one step. The bar along the top of the demo does the same:
Steps you skip go ungraded, and the bench fills in a sensible blank for them.
Measure, saw, anneal, solder, true, set and polish, at a lamp-lit bench where the gold is real 3D and the light behaves like light. Rush the saw and the blade snaps. Heat past dull cherry and the metal goes glassy. Ruined work goes back to the melt pot, and the gold you lose is the customer's.
Mestre Abílio, the old goldsmith you're buying the shop from, is blind. He can't see your work, so he listens to it: the saw binding, the flame roaring, the solder's flash.
The same verbs come back all year, in harder metal. Gold solder flows only 100 to 150 °C under the gold. Softer gold dents under the mallet. And in September a letter from Porto asks for platinum: a city torch, dark glass, a clean bench, and a metal that glows white, so you can't judge the heat by its colour.
Abílio's lesson pieces
Firescale, pickle, a wide margin
The ouro de lei, the folk standard
Softer, dearer, less forgiving
Mix the alloy to hit the colour
1,768 °C, through dark glass
Each month is a chapter with a real 1911 feast for its deadline. The Republic is new: in April a law puts the Church's gold on a State inventory, and in May the escudo replaces the real.
Thirty-one named characters, each with a commission, from the morgada who watches the scale to a water spirit who pays in coal.
Certified Portuguese filigree wire is that fine or finer. You draw it yourself, hole by hole, and coil it into hearts.
The ouro de lei. At 800 parts in a thousand the assay office stamps a deer's head; below it, a swallow.
Prices in réis with the cifrão, until the escudo arrives on 22 May 1911 and the same money is written 1$20.
The design document is public. It's the game as it's meant to ship:
