Welcome to the Islands!

We’re pleased introduce the first Crab Fragment Games product, the Island Deck, along with its debut game Showboat.

Last week we received our proofs from Drive Thru Cards, and now we’ve posted links to that deck, as well as the beta rules for Showboat, and the Alpha rules for Powderkeg, on the Island Deck page. As a bonus, today we also updated the Alpha rules for Pirate’s Bluff, which is coming in March.

For fun, we thought we’d share some details about the history of The Island Deck, and how it came to become Crab Fragment’s launch title.

Deep in the Before Times

It’s not unusual that James Ernest will write a game for a publisher, at their request, only to watch them change their minds and be stuck with a game that nobody else needs. We usually chalk these reversals up to the merits of the design itself, although often the publisher just changes their mind in the (often very brief) interval between asking for a design and getting the first draft.

As James mentions in Cheapass Games in Black and White, sometimes this turnaround period is less than a week. “Did I say I wanted a game that you could play in a bar? I guess what I meant was a game about owning a bar. Everyone wants to own a bar. That’s what I want. In fact, I think I will go open a bar.”

So as often happens, Showboat and The Island Deck began as a game from James Ernest’s list of “someday” ideas, which was requested by another publisher, who went another way because someone else pitched them a similar game in the intervening months. Or, rather, month.

The original concept was (basically) about people trying to sneak out of a restaurant without paying. Imagine a random group of broke teenagers, going to the Olive Garden, eating as much as they can, and then trying not to be seen disappearing one by one out the back door. The cards in the deck represented several courses of food, which eventually became the ranks in the Island deck, plus twelve “story” cards, which eventually became the face cards.

The ranks (courses) had to be played in logical order (entree before dessert, etc), but the stories could be told anytime. And each time you ate something (playing a card to your tableau), you got to order something else (picking up a new card to play later). It made a lot of sense as a game, if not as a product.

A Second Attempt

The following year, James worked up a new plan for this deck with artist Echo Chernik. They put together an elaborate backstory, based on the idea of running the Blade Runner timeline backwards a hundred years to figure out where it all came from, with the goal of drawing lots of gorgeous stylized farming robots.

They created a concept in which a huge number of farm robots found themselves unemployed after the Dust Bowl, and set up a commune called Silverton in northern Arizona. That ended badly when the place was disbanded and the robots were conscripted into military service at the beginning of WWII. The brief Silverton period was then romanticized in the post-war era, during which time an Italian farmer called Simon Fratelli used Silverton as a theme for his new card game, a six-suited update of a traditional Italian game called Quattro Punti.

The game would be included as part of a time capsule: a cigar box from grandma’s attic with keepsakes from the Silverton era like comic books, newspaper clippings, campaign pins, tin toys, and two games including the Farmer’s Game and a track-style game from the back of a cereal box. This project would require quite a bit of world building, and would make a pretty cool Kickstarter for anyone who knew how to source all that stuff.

Sadly, we did not, and this very cool project seemed too big for Echo and James to handle. They pitched it to a few publishers who didn’t really get it, and then it fell by the wayside when they happened upon an even cooler project which is yet to be announced. (Ha!)

Enter the Crabs

The origin of “Crab Fragment Games” is just silly. It was the dumbest company name that James Ernest could think of in fifteen seconds, for a PowerPoint slide showing just how ugly a corporate logo can be when you plaster it in the corner of every game card. But the logo grew on all of us, and when James sold Cheapass Games and decided to launch a new design studio, Crab Fragment Labs was the unanimous choice.

James’ wife Carol suggested that the studio should have an Island theme, and even a fake back story of its own, and since the Framer’s Deck was looking for a home, they decided to redesign it as the Island Deck. The Farmer’s Game never really had a name, though we had considered calling it "Showboat” because that was our nickname for the best scoring hand.

In January 2020, James created a new set of suits and card designs for the Island Deck, and selected it as the first release for Crab Fragment. It’s a versatile deck, so although the game Showboat was created in tandem with the deck, we expect to create many more games that are uniquely suited to it.

The deck has a new back story that’s intertwined with the history of Crab Fragment Cay. Rather than a nostalgic keepsake with pictures of farming robots, it is now a gift shop souvenir of a traditional card deck, having been brought to the Islands in 1518 by the explorer Roya Ruiz García Alarcón, better known as The Red Barber. The world of Crab Fragment Cay, Les Isles Rouges, Tiempo Libre, and so on, are actually part of the fictional setting of Littlebeard, a miniatures game held over from the Cheapass days, and coming to Crab Fragment Labs later in 2020.

So Here We Are.

Do all these games have such a rich backstory, both real and fake? Not really. As soon as we started writing new games for the Island Deck, we happened on an interesting new mechanic in Powderkeg: a bluffing game where only the dealer plays a hand. It’s basically a card game adaptation of the “Monte Hall” problem, with enough wrinkles to keep it interesting. Powderkeg came about in one weekend, though we will continue refining it for a few months, and its backstory is already knitted into the Crab Fragment legacy.

Hop over to the Island Deck Games Page for links to all the rules and decks, and keep checking for new games from Crab Fragment Labs! If you want to learn a little more about the world of Littlebeard, check out our nascent story pages at World Anvil. Note: at the time of this writing, there isn’t much there except a world map.