The game begins in 1680 in northern Bohemia, in the forests around Arnultovice (Arnsdorf), near today's Nový Bor, which was then called Haida. A furnace was kept burning for months and the melting pots in it cracked one after another. People also drank quite a lot at the furnace, which is why beer is part of the workers' pay in the game as well. The finished glass traveled from there through Haida to Dresden, Vienna, and Venice.
Glassworks Fajrum is a browser game built on this: fire, sand, potash, and the people at the furnace. No fantasy, just a craft that has to add up.
Why 1680
It is a turning point in glassmaking. Renaissance forest glass (waldglas) - greenish, often cloudy, melted from potash and beech ash - gives way in Bohemia to Baroque crystal. Johann Kunckel had shortly before published his Ars Vitraria Experimentalis (1679), arsenic is starting to be used as a fining agent, and ruby glass, which gets its color from colloidal gold dispersed in the melt, is still a recipe that very few manage to pull off.
The game map is built on real places. Arnsdorf is the starting glassworks in the middle of the deep forest, Haida (Nový Bor) the trade center where finished goods go. Polevsko, Lindava, and Česká Lípa each have their own role in the game world.
From forest to goblet
The chain starts in the forest and ends at a goblet or a chandelier. Wood is cut for fuel and for making potash in the kiln, quartz sand and limestone are dug from the quarry, and beech ash is leached to obtain potash. These materials are mixed into a batch, which goes into a pot in the furnace.
The pot (Häfen) is the most important and fastest-wearing part of the glassworks. A pot maker makes it from refractory clay, and after a limited number of batches it cracks. The furnace has four slots and each is set separately, so waldglas, crystal, and cobalt blue can melt side by side. How you divide the slots is one of the main tactical decisions.
After melting comes fining, and it cannot be skipped. Without a fining agent, bubbles and striae stay in the glass and the buyer returns the piece or pays less. Table salt (NaCl) is the cheapest but weakest, manganese dioxide is the middle option, and arsenic, a novelty at the time, cleans best and costs most. Colored glass and especially ruby set even higher demands, so fining them with salt does not pay off.
Finally the glassblowers step in. They are named workers with stats and traits who join the glassworks during the campaign. Elias Böhm blows crystal, Marie Wagner teaches and specializes in filigree. Without a glassblower you get only a raw shard for a few groschen, with one you get goblets, vessels, panes, cups, or apothecary vials at a multiple of the price.
Season after season: forest, people, and pots
The game has no single winning goal. Each season is a closed story that ends with a score, and next year you start again, a little wiser.
The forest. Twenty parcels at the start seem generous, but the furnace burns wood, the kiln for potash consumes it, and it also goes into new buildings. Whoever cuts without a plan ends up in the third season with a stump field and a cold furnace. The forest does regrow, but slowly.
The people. Workers want a regular wage and beer. One jug a day keeps mood and output normal. A double ration raises morale but adds a ten percent chance of an accident: a cheerful glassblower breaks pieces and a melter overheats the furnace. A triple ration means a quarter chance of an accident, and a pot exploding at night pleases no one. Watch fatigue too: a melter without time off makes more mistakes, a glassblower without rest ruins more pieces, and one who is not paid on time for three seasons leaves for the competition in Falkenau and takes three years of experience with him.
The pots. A cheap pot saves three groschen and swallows a whole batch tomorrow. A master pot from an experienced pot maker lasts longer and the glass from it is better. Each slot shows wear, so replace the pot before you have to. If one cracks anyway, you lose the batch and the materials, morale drops by 8, and the repair costs time and groschen. A warning comes first, though: the slot shows that a single batch remains.
Ruby that is born in the cold
Ruby glass is a so-called strike glass. After melting it is pale golden, and it gets its color only through controlled cooling, which the game shows in a dramatic strike modal with an animation. A successful ruby is the most valuable product in the game, adds +8 morale to the whole glassworks, and is recorded in the Archive. A failed one returns a single clear crystal and knocks morale down. It is a task for more experienced players.
Archive and achievements
Breakthroughs are recorded in the 📖 Archive tab. Fourteen parchment pages tell of the history and technology of glassmaking, from the composition of the batch through the chemistry of fining agents to Kunckel's ruby secret. They unlock through play: the first fined batch, the first blown piece, the first cobalt blue, the first ruby.
There are fourteen achievements in four categories. Some come on their own, such as the first ten batches, ten workers, or the first export. Others require special conditions the game does not reveal, for example a piece blown from four types of glass in a single season, or a debt paid off before the end of the first winter.
Six paths to the endgame
Once you master basic production, the game splits into six specializations. Each plays in its own style, aims at its own product, and ends with its own kind of buyer.
Crystal clarity leads through cutting and engraving to chandeliers for the Vienna Hofburg. Cathedral light builds on colored glass, stained glass, and commissions for Prague or Dresden churches. The ruby secret, the hardest and best-rewarded path, leads through Kunckel's recipe, gold dust, and colloidal gold to an imperial gift. The enamel manufactory aims at regular export of painted vessels to Venice and London, filigree and jewelry at a place as supplier to the Habsburg nobility. The peddler export builds on cheap forest glass in bulk: glass carriers from Haida (Haidaer Glasträger) carried baskets of glass across all of Europe.
In the fourth act comes a decision every player solves differently. Sell the glassworks and leave rich? Hand it over to a son or daughter? Or write the recipes down in the Archive and leave them to the region?
Where the numbers come from
Fajrum was created as a tribute. The main author's father is a professional glass technologist, and most of the game's numbers come from his notes. Examples: ten tons of wood leave roughly one hundredweight of ash, from which about three kilograms of potash were leached; a pot matures for six months before it can be used; a glassblower and a pontil man work in pairs, and a cold seam means a reject. From the literature the game draws on Kunckel's Ars Vitraria Experimentalis and on research by Valentová, Sedláčková, and Rohanová, and narratively it loosely follows the book by Břetislav Tománek, I Apprenticed as a Glassmaker.
The Nový Bor region today
The area around Nový Bor still bears traces of its glassmaking past. The Glass Museum in Nový Bor is worth a visit, and the surrounding villages remember the German names Haida, Blottendorf, and Arnsdorf. In local workshops glass is still blown by hand, in principle with the same technique as at the time the game takes place.
Ignis mutat res. - the game's motto
The game runs at fajrum.cz directly in your browser, with no installation or registration. The furnace is lit.