Even in early access, Tavern Keeper already feels like the fantasy pub sim of my dreams

It's a normal day in my tavern. A talking skeleton has lurched in and is standing at the bar inquiring about a job. A pale white octopus is swimming through the swamp to deliver my order of potatoes and rat meat. I'm using arcane magic to peer into the future to gain some extremely important knowledge: will anyone visiting my pub tonight have a hankering to play darts?

I've long been looking for a great fantasy game where instead of a brave adventurer I could just be a humble tavern keeper, and it's finally arrived—and appropriately enough, it's called Tavern Keeper. Despite it being in early access, and despite having only played for about 8 hours, I've already fallen head over heels for it.

Tavern Keeper's tutorial is almost shockingly brief: after plopping you into a rundown pub in a gloomy swamp, you run through the basics of how to buy kegs of booze and serve them to customers, hire workers and assign them jobs, and order supplies that can be cooked into meals.

But that tutorial is just the start of a learning process that hasn't ended even after eight hours of play. There's a to-do list to keep both your customers and staff satisfied, from managing room temperature and decorations to improving the quality of the food and drink you serve to making sure the lantern you hung over the toilet in the bathroom doesn't cause a fire.

Plus, this is a fantasy realm full of orcs, halflings, elves, wizards, rogues, and plenty of magic. As you manage your pub, you frequently encounter storybook events, many of which give you choices to make. I had to choose if I wanted to hire that skeleton to work in my bar (I did, naturally), and later he had another quandary when he wondered if having a proper face might endear him more to customers. (I said no. I like his skull just the way it is.)

There are even RPG-like skill checks for certain encounters, like when I was chasing down an arsonist who had been setting fires in my tavern and had to use my dexterity to grab him.

Once I'd completed the swamp campaign, I took over a second tavern in a Shire-like realm which was packed with new challenges and events, including a huge harvest festival and a vote-based competition between different guilds. (The Thieves Guild, unsurprisingly, stole their way to victory.) I'm now on a third campaign, set in a barren desert of the orcs, where an orc scientist is giving me access to the latest in fantasy tech, like cooling fans and experimental beverages.

Tavern Keeper makes great use of its fantasy setting. Since people can't call up with reservations, I just use a magic scrying board to look into the future to see when large groups will be visiting, allowing me to stock up on provisions ahead of time. I also get advice from a tavern elemental that lives in a bottle. And everyone is perfectly happy when the meal du jour is rat on a stick—especially because I've started serving higher-quality rats.

The details in the animation are outstanding, and just about every time I zoom in to peer closely at one of the little figures in my tavern I see something delightful. Two of my employees sat down at a table in the breakroom on their offhours. My orc bartender pulled out a little knife and started playing mumblety-peg, which is cute enough. But my janitor took a small portrait from his vest, looked at it, planted a big kiss on it, and then put it back in his pocket. Just that little moment of animation gave my worker a bit of backstory: he's got a sweetie back home he misses. Wonderful stuff.

Even watching my chef make stew isn't a simple animation. She chops up some ingredients, dumps in others, stirs the cauldron, and even takes a sip while it's cooking to see how it's coming along. When you order supplies from farms or breweries, they come from different parts of the realm and have different delivery systems. One of them is some sort of courier golem that's about 10-feet tall, which strides to your front door, shudders for a moment, then explodes, showering the groceries you ordered to the ground, its delivery mission and purpose in life complete. I love this stuff.

If you like designing and decorating, there's a really robust item creation system to play with, so you can build and decorate bookcases and clocks and pretty much everything else you can think of. Everything you make can be shared with the community, and there are already lots of items made by players and the developers you can add to your new tavern.

Despite over a decade in development, take caution that Tavern Keeper is still an early access game. I've run into plenty of bugs, mostly having to do with employees getting stuck or not completing their duties. Nothing game-breaking, but enough to be occasionally frustrated by. There's a button for reporting bugs, though, and Tavern Keeper has been updated with patches every day (even multiple times per day) since its launch earlier this week, so the team at Greenheart Games is still working hard.

I'm excited to keep playing, and once I'm done with the third campaign I'll try my hand at freeplay. There are also other realms planned for the future, like an underground dwarven settlement and one set in an elven village.

Here's Tavern Keeper's early access roadmap to see what else is on the horizon. It's also on sale for 20% off on Steam until November 17.