Second on our board and the only platform that hands you the tools rather than a game — worldbuilders write their own rules, narrator, and memory, wrapped in presentation that ties the best in the category and slowed by the longest waits.

Craft is the successor platform from the studio behind Friends & Fables — a ground-up rebuild rather than an evolution, which is why players call it Friends & Fables II. The team told us directly that F&F was built on older, less capable models and was too hard to modernize, so they started over: no D&D 5e lock-in, no single Franz-style house narrator, and no one prescribed memory system. It left closed beta on 31 July 2026 and is now an open beta anyone can play, with a free tier.

What replaces all of that is a creator layer. Worldbuilders define their own ruleset, write their own narrator’s voice and behavior, and author memory structures in markdown per world. It’s a deliberate bet that distributing the hard problems across thousands of creators beats solving them centrally — and the product’s center of gravity is clearly the person building the world, not the person dropping in to play one.

Presentation is the other headline. The interface reads like a visual novel — character sprites above a text box, expressions that shift as characters speak, plus actual in-game cinematics — which makes it, alongside Tidefall, the best-looking thing we’ve seen in this category — the two arrive there by opposite routes, staging against atmosphere. The seam still showing is between the tactical map layer and the narration: the map gives you troops, terrain, and markers, and the narrator misplaces or ignores them. The team names context management as its own top open problem.

The studio shipped its first in-house world, Project SABLE, in July 2026 — a secret-bureau setting about covering up monster outbreaks in 2090, built with the same creator tools it hands to everyone else.

One gap worth naming: Craft is still single-player to play. Cofounder Will, on 25 August 2026: “we’re going to be rolling out multiplayer project editing within the next few days and then multiplayer gameplay sometime within the next month hopefully.” The first half arrived the next day — project collaboration shipped 26 August 2026, letting an owner invite up to four more editors to build a project alongside them, with publishing and versioning still owner-only. The second half has not: as of 12 September 2026 there is no way for two people to play a game together. Neither had shipped when we tested, so neither is reflected in the score below.

What It Scores

4.3 out of 5 — second on our board, a tenth of a point behind Voyage, which passed it on 31 August 2026. Craft takes a 5 on three axes, and holds Mechanical Depth — 5 against every platform above and below it. Mechanical Depth — 5 because a worldbuilder can code new gameplay systems rather than configure existing ones. Determinism & Fairness — 5 because the mechanics resolve exactly as the world’s author wrote them; an unfair world on Craft is an unfair author, not an unfair platform. Signature Design — 5 because nothing else in the directory hands the design surface itself to its players.

What holds it back is at the other end. Memory & Continuity — 4: it passed our planted-fact probe, but it still garbles recent events and has let NPCs forget promises they made themselves — which is the exact gap Voyage closed to take a 4.25 and the top of the board. Player Agency — 3.5: railroading is a non-issue, puppeting is not — it will occasionally put words and actions in your character’s mouth. And Longevity — 3.5, held down almost entirely by turn latency: processing a turn takes roughly as long as reading and playing one, which is the single most tiring thing about a long session here.

Pricing

Verified on the Craft pricing page, 12 September 2026. Plans are monthly; “Core models” are available on every tier, “All Models” from Starter up.

Tier	Price	What it adds
Free	$0/mo	Limited Core model usage, 10 project slots, 10 game slots
Starter	$19.99/mo	Increased Core usage, 100 daily energy, 20% rollover, all models, 50 projects / 20 games
Plus	$39.99/mo	Unlimited Core usage, 200 daily energy, 30% rollover, 75 projects / 30 games
Pro	$59.99/mo	Unlimited Core usage, 300 daily energy, 40% rollover, 100 projects / 40 games
Max	$99.99/mo	Unlimited Core usage, 500 daily energy, 50% rollover, 150 projects / 60 games
Ultra	$199.99/mo	Unlimited Core usage, 1,000 daily energy, 50% rollover, 250 projects / 100 games

Paid tiers are metered in daily “energy” that partially rolls over, with unlimited use of the Core model band from $39.99. Starter and Ultra are the two ends most people never need: Starter still meters Core play once its daily allowance runs out, and Ultra exists for players who want a bigger energy allowance than Pro rather than anything Pro cannot do. The free tier is a real one — enough daily Core usage to build and play, with ten slots on each side, and unlimited instant file generations since 29 August 2026.

Read the full review for the campaign this score came out of, the developer interview for the reasoning behind the rebuild, and Craft vs Friends & Fables for how the successor compares with the platform it was built to replace.