RainBand: Letterpress

Composing Stick is a puzzle game about setting metal type by hand. It is made for people who own a tabletop Adana or Kelsey press, spend weekends at letterpress workshops, or simply love how type looks in the case.

You are the compositor in a small jobbing print shop. Orders arrive on the spike: a calling card for a Bristol wine merchant, a 1917 ration notice, a pub poster, a wedding card, a beer-mat. There is no typing. You pick mirror-reversed sorts out of a wooden case and set them in the composing stick from right to left, the way it was done for five hundred years.

THE CRAFT IS THE PUZZLE
Every line has to fill the measure exactly. Justify it with em and en quads, thick, mid and thin spaces until it sits tight, because a loose line drops type when the forme is lifted. Mind your p's and q's: in the case they look like each other. Spot the wrong-fount sort that someone distributed into your Caslon case and throw it in the hellbox. Catch the letter lying upside down before it prints. Use the fi and ffl ligatures where a proper printer would.

Then lock the forme into the chase with wooden furniture and leads, turn the quoin key until it is snug but not sprung, roll on the ink, lay the sheet to the gauge pins and pull the lever to a kiss impression or a deep bite, whichever the client asked for.

THE PROOF TELLS THE TRUTH
The proof comes off the press with the reader's blue pencil on it: w.f. for wrong fount, turn for a turned letter, eq # for uneven spacing, lig., lit. and pie. It is scored against the order, and the client pays accordingly.

WHAT'S IN THE SHOP
- 63 jobs across three eras: The Jobbing Shop (1760 to 1860), Bills & Notices (1860 to 1950) and The Revival (1965 to today)
- Real faces: Caslon and Caslon Italic, Bodoni, Clarendon, Gill Sans, and Tuscan, Antique and Fat Face wood letter for posters
- A rush job every morning, with a streak to keep
- The Proof Wall, which keeps every proof you pull, with room to pin photos of prints from your own press
- The Case Book: 64 real printing terms, from quoin and chase to where "mind your p's and q's" and "out of sorts" come from
- A supply catalogue: an engraved gauge stick, brass hair spaces, a torque quoin key, a rubber roller, a bench lamp, a second case and a Vandercook No. 4
- Block Maker: turn a photo into a linocut, halftone or engraved printer's mark that is stamped on your proofs
- An indenture of 18 clauses that takes you from Printer's Devil to Master Printer

No account, no ads, no data collected. Works fully offline.