Master Work 

A board game where you are the piece: run, grab the materials, finish first.

You are the piece. Master Work is a board game played from inside the board: run across the yard, take the materials before your rival does, and finish your masterpiece before the bell.

Four baskets sit around the square, four pieces in each. Walk to one and take every piece of a single material — everything you leave behind spills into the centre for whoever gets there next. Then carry what you took to your workshop and fill a bench. That is the whole game, and the whole problem: you cannot reach for it, you have to go, and the other one is going too.

The four rules

• A table scores only if you fill it exactly before the round ends.
• Each table takes one material only, and each material only once per table.
• Whatever is still in your hands at the bell goes in the bin, and costs points at once.
• Six pieces in the bin and you have lost, whatever the score says.

The five benches hold one, two, three, four and five pieces. Take four of something with only a three-space bench free and the extra is already costing you — so most of the game is deciding what you can afford to pick up.

The Master's Hammer

Take from the centre first and you pay for it: the token drops straight into your bin. In exchange you get the hammer. Once per round it closes a bench that needs one last piece, and while you carry it the benches you could strike start to pulse. Use it before the bell or lose it.

Against the clock

The first round gives you two minutes. Every round after that gives you ten seconds less, down to a floor of seventy. The match ends when someone completes a full row of their wall — or when someone is forced to throw away a piece with the bin already full, and loses on the spot no matter what the score says.

Controls

WASD or arrows to move · E to pick up and drop · Q for the hammer · Esc to pause

Good to know

• A match runs about ten minutes. One sitting, no saving.
• Two opponents: the Apprentice slips up and leaves you the centre, the Master takes it away.
• Plays in English or Italian, following your system language.
• Plays in the browser. The first load pulls down about 42 MB, then it is cached. There is a Windows build too.

Made solo in Godot 4. Every object you see — the workshops, the baskets, the hammer, the characters — is modelled in a small in-house editor and exported as a real asset: nothing in the scene is drawn by the game at runtime.