May the Best Craft Win

The forge is the game.

May the Best Craft Win is an idle party-management RPG. You never control a fight directly. You pick four adventurers, set their tactics, choose a dungeon and a run length from a five-minute foray to an eight-hour campaign, and send them off. While you are away they clear rooms, drink from their belts, push or pull back at checkpoints, and fill a loot feed. When you come back, the real game starts.

Every gain is gated behind a risk you chose.

• Refine a weapon from +7 toward +10 knowing each strike past +8 can destroy it, or hedge with a Blessed Seal and settle for a downgrade.
  
• Socket, enchant and re-roll affixes with orbs that drop once in a thousand rooms.
  
• Identify sealed rares one scroll at a time, and learn which bases are worth the anvil.
  
• Push at a checkpoint for better loot, or extract and keep what you have. A wipe loses what was never sent home.

Six classes, twelve branches, skills that fork.

Knights, mages, priests, rogues, berserkers and rangers each choose a branch, and every mastered skill opens a variation of its own. Buffs and auras reach the whole party, elemental marks left by a caster are set off by a physical hit, and the Run Report tells you afterwards exactly what happened and why.

Twelve dungeons, then Hell.

Twelve painted dungeons across sixteen tiers, each with its own bosses, retinues and mimics. Below them all is Hell: an endless descent with no tier, only depth, where the last team to fall at a checkpoint stands there as its guardian for every other player. From room 45 on, nobody comes back. What a lost team pays for is souls, and the scrolls that let you skip the waiting.

A market, a shopfront, and other houses.

Sell surplus to a simulated trade house that moves with what players sell, run your own shopfront with villagers who haggle, and when the World Dungeon departs on the hour, walk it alongside other houses. Found an alliance, declare a war, and trade on a floor where every item is held in custody until the deal is done.

Absence is respected.

Being offline never punishes you. It just does not advance you as fast as a well-configured party does. The numbers stay legible: two items side by side, and you can tell which is better.

Some of the game's art and sound was generated with AI tools under human direction; the full disclosure is on this page.