Your Uncle Barnaby kept this tavern for sixty years. Now the keys are yours. Arrange the room, brew the beer, cook the stew and keep a town full of particular people coming back, alone or with up to three friends.
Keg & Crypt is a cozy management game about running a fantasy tavern the slow, proper way. You decide where the bar goes and how close the benches sit to the fire. You mash the grain, wait days for the keg to come good, then tap it and pour. Guests walk in off the street with a few coins, a thirst and opinions, and they remember how you treated them.
Play it alone on a quiet evening or open the doors to friends online. Four keepers can share one tavern: someone at the taps, someone in the kitchen, someone sweeping up after the dice table. And when the cellar runs short of things no grocer sells, there's a door under the stairs that Uncle Barnaby always kept locked.
The tavern starts as a bare hall with a good roof. Every bench, rug, candelabrum and keg rack sits on a grid you lay out yourself, and the layout matters. Guests notice a draughty seat by the door, a crowded bar, a table nobody has wiped.
Drinks aren't bought, they're made. Mash barley malt and hops for ale, press apples for cider, and set the keg to ferment. It takes real in-game days, so the brewing you do on Monday is what you serve on Thursday.
Every guest is a person, not a coin. Each comes in with needs, tastes and a budget, and judges the wait, the price, the seat and the state of the floor. Treat them well and they come back with friends. Overcharge them for flat cider and they'll tell the whole street.
Run the place solo, or invite up to three friends online and split the work however you like. Everyone keeps the same tavern, the same books and the same regulars, so a good night is a shared one and so is a disastrous one.
The keys are on the hook by the hearth, the big one is for the cellar. Sixty years I stood behind that bar and I don't regret a night of it. Keep the fire high and the prices honest, and the town will look after you.
And whatever you hear down there, don't go below without a lantern.
Barnaby Morel
Uncle Barnaby Morel hands you the keys to his old tavern, the Keg & Crypt, after sixty years behind the bar. He stays on for your first opening to show you how it's done: where the kegs go, how to read a guest who's about to leave, why you never water the cider.
Then comes the night the tavern burns, and in the morning Uncle Barnaby is gone. Whatever took him didn't come in through the front door.
Rebuild the tavern, keep the town fed and watered, and find out what your uncle was keeping under the floor.
Work-in-progress captures from the current build. Select a plate to see it larger.
Below the cellar, past the last row of kegs, the stairs keep going. The crypt under the tavern is older than the town, and it's where the best ingredients in the game are found: cave moss for a stout no one else can brew, pale mushrooms for a stew guests will cross the county for, and things your uncle wrote down but never explained.
Delve by lantern-light, alone or as a party, and bring back rare ingredients and loot the market can't sell you. Then get it up the stairs before opening time.
The crypt is still being dug. Coming in a later update.
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