Design and build your own medieval tavern!
Tavern Master is a medieval tavern management game where you are in charge of building, maintaining and running your very own cozy tavern!
Buy tables and benches, fill barrels with drinks, hire staff and you are ready to serve your first customers. Make sure your employees are happy, there are enough drinks and seats for guests and soon you will be able to expand your business in various ways.
- Build a kitchen and hire chefs to start serving food of all kinds. Make sure that there are enough ingredients or your customers might leave angry
- Hold special events to attract special customers who have very specific food and drink requirements. They will come in the morning and stay all day
- Hire musicians to attract more people to your tavern and make customers have more patience while waiting for a drink
Build your dream tavern
You will have many tools at your disposal that will help you create a perfect tavern. There are many different walls, floors, fences, stairs, and furniture that will make every tavern unique. At the beginning, there will not be enough gold to buy the best quality furniture, but as your business grows, so will the tavern! As a cherry on top, make sure to think of an amazing name for it!
Optimize the workflow
In order to attract customers, you will need to have enough seats and tables with a light source close by. The surrounding area also needs to look beautiful, and decorations will help with that. At one point, there will be a lot of guests coming in, and it is important that your staff can serve everyone before they leave angry from waiting too long. In order to do that, you will have to design the space, so there is an efficient way for your employees to walk in an optimized route.
Create rooms for overnight stay
Some of the guests will want to spend the night, so it’s a great thing that you can create rooms with beds in your tavern! Every room will be rated with stars from 1 to 5 which will determine how much money you can earn from the guests. It’s your choice if you want to create big rooms with five beds or smaller rooms with expensive furniture that would make guests spend more money.
Many ways to play
There are many different possibilities in Tavern Master, and there is no single best way to play. You can spend your time decorating the tavern and making it look cozy and beautiful. You can work towards maximizing revenue by adjusting seating arrangements, prices, and salaries for the staff or figure out a completely new way like building only bedrooms instead of having the bar and the kitchen.
Review
Tavern Master is a fun, relaxing game about building your own Tavern and managing it. It’s not particularly complex and doesn’t need a manual to figure out what to do when, and how to do why. I’ve played plenty of hours in this game, and it is addicting. The soundtrack adds a nice ambiance to the game atmosphere. For an indie game, this does much better than what Crossroads Anniversary Inn tried to be. That said, the potential for such a game like this is immense. It has a thriving discord and an active developer that is regularly taking feedback from the community. At its core base, the simplification of organizing a tavern and earning money to build and decorate your tavern has never been greater. In terms of content, it could add a lot more to make this addicting game even more fun.
Tavern Master is a medieval management game, that is for sure. It’s a relaxing simulator. The unlimited freedoms that you have in this game is a removal of a handicap of complicated systems and unforgivable UI that requires a steep learning curve. You attract customers, research technology to build new unlockable items, and hire waitresses and staff. Such examples can be benches, luxurious benches, armor, weapons, banners, etc. What the game doesn’t have at that moment is the ability to paint your tavern’s items individually. And I am not a fan of having special buildings to be maxed at one per item. As of now, the game’s core base is solid. What it needs is more content and more features. Of course, your employees have to be basic. You can pretty much increase their salaries or decrease their wages. That being said, the features of roleplaying with your waiters/waitresses could be more developed. Perhaps your waiter wants to do a different job? Perhaps your waitresses have to deal with angry customers that storm out of the inn? There are plenty of rowdy customers that can be added into the game for certain that can affect your business. Certain customers will not want to attend your tavern if the rowdy and drunk customers ruin your business.
And while your tavern surrounds a castle, I did find it disappointing to be only surrounded by woods. I would have expected a market to be in the vicinity of the neighborhood. I also want NPCs walking in and around the inn to be diverse. Perhaps merchants, perhaps soldiers, perhaps knights. These are suggestions only to increase the immersion. Another thing that must be taken into consideration is the placing of objects in your tavern. You should plan at least carefully to make sure that there are benches with seats, that customers can go and sit. Place them in the wrong position, and you’ll get more angry customers that can’t go to their seats. So planning or a rough idea of what you’re going to do before you start is key. The UI must also be praised, and I like the simple design that the developer went for. You can also hire musicians, which cost a lot, and they can detract from your income, so be sure to save as much income as possible. This is a game of grinding, but where the grinding is actually fun and wants you to do more of it. This is something that most triple AAA games with RPG mechanics (I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed and Elder Scrolls Online) where most grinding is a chore. Grinding in this game isn’t a chore, and I think this is a valuable lesson to be learned. You don’t need to make a game complicated, and you don’t often need to make games with a steep learning curve.
The other aspect of this game has special events in which you hire adventurers to hunt special ingredients for you. You may, of course, run out of these special ingredients if you spend too much. Those special ingredients can be used to host events and invite important VIP guests such as the Vikings, the Executioners, and the King and his royal family. However, they don’t give enough of a boost in regards to your ingredients, sponsorship, or payments. So I’d want a unique reward system added alongside this. For example, for the next six weeks after my successful Viking-themed feast, I get an unlimited surplus of mead and ale, but perhaps for a small fee. If I get the King’s reward, I get an unlimited amount of raw food to use for my chefs to use. This would be quite nice. Also, building your own adventurers room is quite nice and adds a decent amount of immersion.
I would love to see a custom tavern option in the main menu, where other creators can create their own taverns. I would love to see a Japanese-Samurai-themed tavern, or maybe an Arabic Tavern based on the Medieval Golden Age of Islam. I would love to see a Spice Trade Bazaar or even a Chinese-themed tavern set in the Medieval era. A mythological tavern based on the Roman-Greek Gods? Now that would be epic. A steam workshop for this mod? Certainly exceptional. This is what I mean. I also feel that RPG quests and a story narrative can be added to this game as well. More special events would be quite good. I feel this game has serious potential.
In conclusion, I have found this game to be addictive, serious, fun, and amazing. It doesn’t require you to scratch your head rocking you to navigate a horrendous UI that is the mainstay of other games. It doesn’t force you to have a steep learning curve. This game can be played by children and they’d manage to figure out this game in 5 minutes. I think more content needs to be added, and the developer has been really active in his work. He takes on the feedback and works hard. For an indie developer, this is one of the best and amazing games I have seen. Its quality triumphs even the best of AAA games simply in the category because it is fun. And video games are meant to be fun, not chores of ever-needlessly grinding. A great game!