A downloadable game

Buy Now$9.00 USD or more

Also included in my fae bundle and my everything bundle of all my games!

Every solstice, the veil thins between the worlds, merging mortal world with fae realm. Some time ago, the goblins started a market on the solstices to encourage friendship, trade, and storytelling between the worlds. Play to get to know your characters, meet fae beings, and ultimately decide where you belong.

Goblin Market is a 1-4 player GMless game meant to be played in one 2-4 hour session. To play, you'll need a deck of cards and a way to write.

Goblin Market is character driven and narrative heavy, and you can collaboratively decide if you want to use the narrative to lean fun and whimsical or a little darker and more intense. You should also decide together if your playthrough is set at the summer solstice or winter solstice, as well as a general setting, e.g., modern, historical, a certain style of fantasy.

While this game doesn’t have a game master and everyone has equal say in what happens, it is recommended that one of the players take on the role of Facilitator. The Facilitator would read through the game beforehand, read descriptive sections aloud during gameplay, and could be the one to draw the cards for everyone if the group is playing long distance and can’t all draw from one physical deck.

Content warnings: food, leaving home, feeling other, not belonging. This game deals with themes of feeling like you don’t belong and deciding whether to stay or go.

This game was inspired by the artwork of Arthur Rackham and written for Rackham Jam!

StatusReleased
CategoryPhysical game
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(17 total ratings)
AuthorEliot Crow
GenreCard Game
Tagsfae, faery, goblin, market, Multiplayer, Narrative, physical, Singleplayer

Purchase

Buy Now$9.00 USD or more

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $9 USD. You will get access to the following files:

Goblin Market.pdf 2 MB
Goblin Market printable.pdf 531 kB
Goblin Market OpenDyslexic.pdf 678 kB
Goblin Market plain text.txt 12 kB

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Community Copies

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Development log

Comments

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I have played several in person games of this with some young kids. They wanted to play as themselves and had fun going to the market and imagining the things they would find there. In the end all of them decided that they weren’t going to eat the faerie food.  Though one of them definitely was more on the edge than the others! Thank you for a fun game for kids!

We had a good time creating our characters and guiding them through the 3 act structure towards their final choice. Our only complaint was that while we generated wonderful, whimsical and wistful anecdotes in response to the prompts in the two acts, they often ended up story orphans because there's nothing in the narrative structure that rewards or guides the players into call-backs. Our group consensus was the desire to have the answers to those prompts matter as you moved through the game, because we enjoyed coming up with them so much.

This is a cute, whimsical game that nevertheless packs a real punch if you let it. I ended up channeling a lot of my queer trauma into my characters; for a game centered around fairies, things got really real really fast... and yet, I never felt unsafe. You can read more of my thoughts on my blog.

Thank you so much for sharing! I had never thought of making an OpenDyslexic version of the games, but I will definitely look into doing that and try to get those up soon!

I had to put things on hold for a while, but I just added a dyslexia-friendly file, and hope to do the same with my other games soon. Thank you for bringing this to my attention!