A look inside
Five screens, and what you actually do on them.
Bellows & Barley is a city building game without a map. You do not place houses on tiles; you decide where your people work, what gets made from what, and when to buy rather than wait. The screens below are the ones you will spend your time on – shown as your own screen would show them, narrow on a phone, side by side on a desktop.
Where do you begin?
Production does not open with a list of 105 workshops but with the question of what you are working on. Every tile is a good, and under it stands how long the road to it is – “Stone · 8 workshops”. If anything in that chain is stuck, the tile says so before you go in.
On a desktop the overview sits beside it: how many jobs are filled, what is short, where hands are missing.
And then only what belongs to it
One tap on tools, and the seven workshops that lead there are all that remain – ordered by stage, raw material on top, product below. You move workers right on the card, and the numbers below change at once, not at the next tick.
The chosen workshop stays open while you do: as a sheet from the bottom on a phone, as a column beside the chain on a desktop.
Building bigger, when it pays
Every workshop can be upgraded: more jobs, more output, higher cost. A building site gathers its materials from the store bit by bit, so you need not wait until everything is in. Whatever is missing is written on the card.
On a desktop the chosen upgrade stands right beside it – “Woodcutter · level 7 → 8”, with what it adds, what it costs in people and time, and what it takes from the store.
Buying what would take too long
The market takes what you have spare and delivers what you lack, at prices that move. If a build should not wait, you simply buy the missing planks. Your treasury fills with taxes and drains through upkeep.
On a desktop the whole table sits side by side: stock, price and trend in one row, with no swiping.
What it really hangs on
Statistics put numbers to what the colours on the cards hint at: how much of a good is needed, how much of that is covered, and how long the store will last.
On a desktop you also get what will not fit side by side on a phone: the surplus over the last twelve hours, production by kind, the treasury as a curve – and, to the right, a reading of which of it should worry you.
Try it
The game is free, needs no account and starts in your browser – on a desktop or on your phone. Start playing, or read the questions and answers first.