The inn has a new face and two new rooms. Tomas joined the crew, and with him came a cellar and a tavern to run. That sounds like just more stuff to keep track of, but it quietly changed the shape of the puzzle in a way I care about a lot.
For a while, only Bram ever had a real choice to make. He is the only one who can work both the garden and the workshop, so on a busy day you had to pick one and let the other go. Everyone else had exactly one job and did it. Tomas breaks that open. He is the only one who can run the cellar and the tavern, so now there are two people each morning who might get pulled two ways at once. Working out who covers what, and which guest you have to turn away today, is a much richer little knot to untie than it was a week ago.
Five rooms and three crew, once the inn is running at full tilt.
While I was in there, I gave everything a face. Every station and every guest now has a small icon, so you can read the day's board at a glance instead of parsing a wall of names. They are stand-in emoji for now, with real art to come later, but even placeholders make the screen feel less like a spreadsheet and more like a place.
Every guest and room has an icon now, so the board reads at a glance.
Here is the part I did not see coming. Once all of that was in, I sat down to play, and the first day was a wall. Five rooms, three crew, a stack of guests, and every system I have built over the past few weeks, all talking at once. If it overwhelmed me, the person who built the thing, a brand new player would bounce right off it.
So the inn opens up slowly now. Your first morning is small and kind: two crew, three rooms, and a couple of guests you can comfortably look after. The pressure and the new rooms arrive across your first week, roughly in the order I built them, so you meet one new idea at a time instead of all of them at once. By the time Tomas and the cellar and the tavern show up, you already know how the place runs.
Your first morning is deliberately small, so there is room to find your feet.
The thing I keep relearning on this project is that depth and approachability are not opposites. They are a pacing problem. The systems can be as deep as I like, as long as I let you grow into them. A good first week is not a tutorial full of arrows and pop-ups. It is just a smaller, warmer version of the same game.
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