Your grandmother left you her guitar shop. Customers come in describing a sound they hear in their heads. You build it, you play it, and one day you hand the shop down.

A private playtest. Please keep the link between friends.

Luthier Legends runs on Windows and Mac. Send yourself this link and open it on your computer.

The workshop: benches, a guitar in progress, and what needs your attention

A shop to run

It starts as a garage with one bench and a stack of reclaimed pine. Orders go up on the cork board, guitars move from bench to bench, rent comes due every season.

Grow it into a storefront, then a workshop. Hire a kid who wants to learn. Hang spare guitars on the wall for walk-ins.

The design bench: picking woods and parts against the customer's tone wheel

Build what they hear

Every order is a sound. Warm or bright, a long ring or a hard attack. Pick the woods and the parts and watch the shape on the wheel move toward theirs.

Then there's the person. One wants a sunburst. One can't stand a shiny guitar. One is allergic to rosewood. Nell will help with a design once a season. The rest is up to you.

Resawing a billet along a wandering line

Your hands at the bench

Ten short jobs. Saw a billet and open it like a book to see the figure inside. Wind a pickup to the count without snapping the wire. Carve braces on the beat, bend the sides over a hot pipe, tap the top until it rings true.

Good work makes a better guitar, and it pays on the spot.

Jam mode: playing a finished dreadnought on the keyboard

Then you play it

Every guitar gets a first strum, and it sounds like what you built. Pick it up and play it on your keyboard or controller. Everything stays in the town's key, so whatever you play sounds like music.

Customers will play you a lick and ask for it back. Get it right and they tell you more about the sound they're after.

Five towns, five sounds

Each town has its own customers, its own wood and its own scale to play in.

RustwaterE blues

A river town. Cypress in the backwater. Half of them play slide.

PinecrestG major pentatonic

Above the snow line. Spruce grows slow up here, and the grain comes in tight.

Neon RowA Dorian

The city. The rent is high and the amps are higher.

SaltreachD Dorian

The coast. Good wood washes up. So do customers.

SoleraE Phrygian dominant

A dry hill above the olives. They build guitars face-down here, the old way.

Two players bending a guitar side together

Two at the bench

Hand a second controller to whoever's on the couch. One heats the pipe while the other bends. One spins the winder while the other lays the wire. When there's nothing on the bench, someone can sweep.

The skill tree, carved as a tree with six limbs

A family trade

A career runs a few years. Then you hang up the apron, choose who takes the shop, and pack three things into a trunk for them.

Every generation unlocks something for the next: a new town, an old trick, a way to start. When it gets easy, there's the Ladder.

Some nights

* The bell over the door rings at midnight. Nobody is there.

There are twelve Legends to find. That's all we'll say.

From the shop

Get the playtest

Version . Free, for friends. Mouse and keyboard or a controller.

Installing on Windows
  1. Unzip the download (right-click, then Extract All).
  2. Double-click Luthier Legends.exe.
  3. If Windows says it protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway. That's because the game isn't signed by a store yet.
Installing on a Mac
  1. Unzip and drag Luthier Legends into Applications.
  2. The first time, right-click the app, choose Open, then Open again.
  3. If macOS still won't open it, go to System Settings, Privacy & Security, and click Open Anyway. If that isn't there, paste this into Terminal:
    xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Luthier Legends.app"
What we'd like to hear
  1. The first twenty minutes. Was it clear what to do next?
  2. Which job at the bench you liked most, and least.
  3. When you stopped playing, and why.
  4. Anything that broke. A screenshot helps.