The Game Cellar
You are a hobby game publisher.
Game inventors around the globe spend countless hours laboring in their dark basements, crafting beautiful things that they hope you might like.
You are opinionated. Flighty. Capricious. You never know what to ask for, but you say you will know it when you see it.
This page is for you.
About Us
Crab Fragment Labs is an independent design studio with a repository of more than 200 original games, spanning a history of more than 30 years.
Our lead designer James Ernest has created games with Wizards of the Coast, Wizkids, Mayfair Games, Steve Jackson Games, Paizo Publishing, Rio Grande Games, Microsoft, and many others. His crowdfunded games have raised more than $2M on Kickstarter, and he is a member of the Origins Awards Hall of Fame.
This page is a list of our unpublished games, aimed directly at publishers. If you’re looking for something new, good, and available, this is the place to start.
Bread Basket
Format: Family Card Game, 2-6 players, 30 Min.
Components: 55 Cards and a way to keep score
Summary: Players take turns playing cards into a central tableau, trying to complete “sandwiches,” which are strings like X-Y-Z-X where X is higher than the cards in between. Score points for the cards you collect, lose points for the cards you don’t play.
Links:
Status: Available for sale (DriveThru); available for licensing
Cold Comfort
Format: City-Building Tile Game, 2-6 players, 60-90 Min.
Components: 28 map tiles, 18 cards, 42 dice, 13 tokens, 72 hotel tiles, scoring track, money.
Summary: Players are hotel owners in the Yukon Gold Rush. Dice represent customers of different size and taste. Players build hotels, invite customers, manage property, and build the city, scoring points each time another map tile is added. Money is the final score.
Links:
(No video yet)
Status: Still in public beta; available for licensing
Linos
Format: Abstract Stacking Game, 2 players, 10 Min.
Components: 12 wooden pieces, 25 coins, one die.
Summary: Described as a lost game in James Ernest’s Dew Point universe, Linos is an ancient-feeling game with simple rules and handsome table presence. Players take turns selecting a piece at random, and adding it to the stack. You score points (coins) by connecting faces of opposite colors, and the game is over in 12 turns.
Links:
Status: Still in public beta; handmade sets for sale; available for licensing
Sandy Diggs (In the Pyramids of Madness)
Format: Lightweight Strategy / Puzzle Game, 2-6 players, 30-50 Min.
Components: 86 Cards, 72 tokens with bag, and 24 coins.
Summary: Players are “adventure archaeologists,” dealing in maps and treasures. The Shifting Sands board is a 5×5 grid with various black and white tokens, and the maps are patterns in the sand that lead to artifacts. Players spend money on maps, take those maps to the desert, and dig up treasures that are worth money and points.
Links:
Status: Still in public beta; available for licensing
Shipwrights of Marino
Format: Lightweight Economic Game, 2-5 players, 60 Min.
Components: One-Page Game Board, 54 cards, 120 resource tokens, 8 Ship Pawns, 6 dice, and money.
Summary: Players are airship builders in the fictional city of Marino. The game is driven by the central marketplace, where six types of resources fluctuate in supply and price. Players take building contracts and buy resources, trying to make the best profits. It’s a carefully balanced economic game with just a little engine building, lightweight and quick like a proper airship.
Links:
Status: Available for sale (DriveThru); available for licensing
Stage Blood / Company of Players
Format: Lightweight Family Card Game, 2-6 players, 20-40 Min.
Components: 86 Cards, 72 tokens with bag, and 24 coins.
Summary: Players are theatrical managers, sending actors to work on various plays. The era is Shakespearean / Renaissance plays, but the theme could be literally any characters-and-quests story. Players choose their actor in secret, and all are revealed, with the lowest numbers acting first, and the highest acting best.
Links:
Status: Still in public beta; available for licensing
Is That All?
Of course not.
The list above showcases some of our absolute best candidates for licensing. But nearly every game in our collection is available in some form.
Why? Well, back in 2019, Cheapass Games licensed its entire catalog to a single publisher, who did very little with it. Eventually they gave it all back to us, and this is why that long list of games is up for grabs. Check out a comprehensive list of those games at Cheapassic Park.
Over the same period, James Ernest continued creating new games under the Crab Fragment banner. Today the list of new games rivals the list of old ones.
Through all of this upheaval, we’ve been reluctant to get back into self-publishing. Even with our outstanding track record, James Ernest would still rather spend his time developing new games, not running a publishing house.
So you’re in luck! If you know what you’re looking for, let us help you find it! And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, we can still help you. Our back catalog is arranged worse than the trash room on the Death Star, but we know our way around.
Poke around the dark corners of the website. Take your time! Or check out these attractive options:
After the Fog: The meatiest game here, an area-control / exploration game from the Dew Point universe.
Agora: A unique tile-based game about a sprawling marketplace.
Bitin’ Off Hedz: The kids love it. This classic Cheapass dinosaur racing game was fully updated in 2023.
BRAWL: James Ernest’s groundbreaking real-time fighting game is faster than a video game, and still looking for the perfect license to bring this game to a new audience.
Fist: A unique chess-like game described in The Verdigris Pawn, by Alysa Wishingrad.
The Harvest: A mind-bending little fighting game with only 36 cards, The Harvest is peak strategy with minimal components.
Letter Boxing: A two-player word game with bluffing and deduction
Paradise Road: This simple travel-themed game is begging to be made into a whole atlas of maps.
Rochi: A unique tarot-style deck and its gambling-style game, from The Stranger, by Sonia Lyris.
Vines: A carefully curated suite of trick-taking games (and some other games too) with a unique five-suited deck, currently living in our Carrisor fantasy universe.
Take a look around. You never know what you might like. Last year someone did a full-on production version of a game from our Ready Room. Variants of Pairs are popular all over. We even had a publisher express some interest in a new edition of FALLING last year. It’s a lot to take in!
Please Support Us on Patreon
We have a Patreon page, as you might expect, and you can help us immeasurably by joining our cadre of Hermit Crabs. If you love what we do, and you want to support our huge catalog of free content, please become a Hermit Crab today!