Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Hardest Player To Please Is Yourself, Part 1: Game Hoard

 Intro



    I have a small issue - which is to say, a zine. Get it? Hah! That's it folks, that's the article, see you next week.

    OK but actually - in 2024, I engaged with the work of two creators who would make me finally look at a kind of TTRPG I'd avoided up to this point, and in doing so lead me down a roughly year long collecting spree which is finally starting to pay off as I move from just planning on playing games into actually playing them: that is to say, Tatiana Gefter's fabulous work on the podcast Soul Operator which is a dramatized playthrough of A Yolland's Welcome To The Habitrails, and Sam Leigh's game Death of the Author. Both Habitrails and DotA (no, not that one) are tarot-centric solo journaling games which prompt you to respond to your card draws, but both in vastly different ways. When I was waiting around for Death of the Author's crowdfunder to fulfill, I decided I'd pick up Habitrails and another game I saw advertised a lot, Pandion Games' Whisper in the Walls 2e, for some Halloween fun. Whisper is also a card-based prompt game, but it uses a standard deck of playing cards which you prepare - and has 2d6 and d66 tables. And only then did I remember I'd actually seen another game that used a deck of playing cards - a game that I'd bought during the adrenaline rush of the ENnies in 2022 which had become a very nice shelf decoration but I'd only read a bit through - Nich Angell's Colostle, which uses the standard deck of cards to build prompts but ALSO has character classes and biome-based travel tables and suddenly I realized there was a lot more to all of this solo RPG stuff than I'd actually understood at the jump.

    In the intervening months since backing Sam's Death of the Author crowdfunder, I have amassed 19 games which are all intended for solo play directly out of the box rather than requiring 3rd party mods to turn them into solo games. I say that not as a dig at any game that has had a fandom strong enough to build an aftermarket solo mod for a game, I just mean that the market for solo games is by no means a small one. Likewise, some of these games are additionally intended to be played as duet games, or 1v1 player vs GM games, or even full party GM-less games. There are all different kinds of oracle methods, as well as all different kinds of actual playstyles to go through. In the interest of cataloging this backlog, and also making an attempt to make a sortable list for myself, I'm going to arrange these games into a lightly annotated list with pictures and first impressions so that not only do you know what I have out there, but I can also just roll a d20 and pick my next game to play pretty easily so that I actually play them rather than just hoard them because BOY HOWDY have I hit decision paralysis mode.

    I should also say - while I have these 19 physical games, to keep this a nice round 20 I'm including a lone bonus in-production solo game that I will absolutely buy once it exists in the physical world. Also, please know that these first impressions below are in almost all cases from a brief flip through - if I flagrantly miscategorize a game, please tell me, but also know that I'm sure I'll learn about it as I play it.

A d20-Rollable List of Games


1. Colostle, by Nich Angell
  • Needed to Play: deck of playing cards, something to record your story, optionally the character sheet included at the back of the book
  • Genre: adventure, robot fantasy
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: Infinity Train, but make it D&D. This book is fucking huge. Most solo games are zines, at least as far as I've seen, but holy shit this thing is big and thin. Very simple character sheet, example of play seems pretty straightforward, seems like there's a lot of contextual tables for how you progress through the world.



2. Welcome to the Habitrails, by A Yolland
  • Needed to Play: tarot deck, something to record your story
  • Genre: various flavors of horror, sci-fi
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: So this is cheating because I did actually begin a playthrough of this but also I've heard the first batch of episodes from Soul Operator so like I know what the vibe is, but for completeness' sake - this is a game that is gonna keep making things get weirder for you in a frog-in-the-pot-of-boiling-water kind of way.


3. Death of the Author, by Samantha Leigh

  • Needed to Play: tarot deck, something to record your story
  • Genre: any, though with a Frankenstinian lens
  • Play Modes: Solo or Duet.
  • First Impression: one of my favorite movies is "Stranger Than Fiction," one of Will Ferrell's only slightly serious movies where he realizes he's a character in a story and his author is going to kill him. This feels kind of like that.


4. Anamnesis, by Samantha Leigh

  • Needed to Play: tarot deck, something to record your story
  • Genre: self-discovery, potentially horror
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: I feel like amnesia as a plot point came up a whole bunch in the 90s and 00s in most of the media I consumed - like, amnesia and quicksand were the two biggest concerns of my childhood. Thankfully I've had to deal with neither of them - but this does at least let me simulate the process of amnesia and self discovery, and I think that's a pretty valuable skill to exercise. Unclear if there's a hard mode that involves speedrunning before you sink into a pit of quicksand, but I'll check back and let you know.




  • 5. The World We Left Behind, by Samantha Leigh

  • Needed to Play: standard deck of playing cards you're willing to besmirch, a besmirching device such as a fine-tipped marker, 1d6, something to record your story
  • Genre: exploration, introspection, sci-fi
  • Play Modes: 1-5 players GMless
  • First Impression: So this project has already had a ballet with a chiptune album score based on it, which fucking rips. But also, the idea of "ruining" a deck of cards as you play is quite interesting to me because while I am loath to alter any game through play (this is why I haven't played much of Yazeba's B&B T_T), I think there's a really interesting conceptual link between the idea of exploring the ruins of a civilization on a planet and then leaving your own mark on the world as you do so. That's just a fascinating thing to chew on.



  • 6. Thousand Year Old Vampire, by Tim Hutchings

  • Needed to Play: 1d10, 1d6, something to record your story
  • Genre: historical vampire fiction
  • Play Modes: Solo or multiplayer GMless
  • First Impression: What a beautiful object. This book is probably the most beautiful TTRPG object that I own, if not the most interesting and beautiful book I own in general. In terms of play, I find it extremely fascinating that it encourages both quickplay and like full journaling situations.



  • 7. My Mother's Kitchen, by Fleit Detrik

  • Needed to Play: tarot deck, 1d12, sticky notes/note cards/scissors/tape, something to record your story in
  • Genre: familial joy and trauma, fulfilling an oath
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: This is also an amazing object. This is also a game that very much encourages you to physically create and then destroy things which is nice since they are not inherently game objects. As someone who lost their grandmother back in 2020, who was incidentally the person who taught me how to cook, I imagine I'm going to have a lot of emotions about this game.


  • 8. Grotten: 1-Bit Deeper, by Tommy Sunzenauer

  • Needed to Play: 2d4, 2d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d20 (fuck d12s, all my homies hate d12s), something to record your character sheet, and either printing out the tiles for the maps and monsters or some graph paper to draw your dungeon in
  • Genre: oldschool fantasy dungeon crawling
  • Play Modes: Solo, or 1 player with a GM
  • First Impression: I ran this as a GM with a buddy of mine a while back and it worked remarkably well. In the way of many old adventures, I feel like it leaves a lot of space for you to project a story on to but only giving you a few things set in stone, which is neat. You'll get out of it what you put into it.


  • 9. Lighthouse at the End of the World, by Ken Lowery

  • Needed to Play: a standard deck of cards, 1d6, a coin, a Jenga tumbling block tower, 10 tokens, any map that contains at least one hemisphere of coastlines, something to record your story in
  • Genre: nautical existentialist horror
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: Look, as a certified Slut For Sea Shanties, giving me Age Of Sail stories of ghosts and isolation and introspection is basically laser targeted at my sensibilities. 


  • 10. No-Tell Motel, by Ken Lowery

  • Needed to Play: a standard deck of cards, 1d6, something to record dossiers about characters and the room ledgers 
  • Genre: murder mystery
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: God I love murder mysteries. Solving mysteries is extremely hard in TTRPGs in general - it's one of the reason I like the Brindlewood Bay/The Between approach to doing it since you never feel stupid while you're playing. I'm curious to see how this set of rules plays out, it seems very well thought out.


  • 11. Eleventh Beast, by Exeunt Press

  • Needed to Play: paper/notebook to sketch on, 5d6, 1d8, a standard deck of cards, three kinds of tokens, and a map (either included or printable) 
  • Genre: monster hunting historical horror
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: This also blows my mind as a combination mystery solving and monster hunting game. You also end up creating a little monster hunter journal, which I think could be a cool prop for other things.


  • 12. Caveat Emptor: Expanded Edition, by Exeunt Press

  • Needed to Play: something to record your story, 3d6, a standard deck of cards, 3 tokens to go along with your curse tracker
  • Genre: Needful Things
  • Play Modes: Solo only
  • First Impression: Look, you had me at "Needful Things: The RPG," but the added bit that you're actually working for the Devil and thus are encouraged to do well at Cursed Capitalism or you get obliterated is extremely funny to me. This probably says a lot about who I am as a person, and that's unfortunate.


  • 13. Blood Borg: Loser, by Adam Vass

  • Needed to Play: the base Blood Borg rules, a standard set of RPG dice plus a coin or d2 and d3 if you're fancy, a character sheet, something to record your story if you want 
  • Genre: punk-ass vampire shit
  • First Impression: God this zine is oozing with style. Or blood. Or both. I know this bends my rules a bit since technically the solo rules are in a zine separate from the main rulebook, but also, shhhhhhhhh. I love the idea of the solo mode basically being the "it's time to get the band back together for a job" except the band is a bunch of other vampires who probably hate you, the job is presumably killing people for fun and sport, and you'll need to outrun cops and monster hunters. Also you can summon weird little guys to help you!


  • 14. Dark Fort, by Pelle Nilsson

  • Needed to Play: one of the provided character sheets, 1d4, 2d6, something to record your story if you want 
  • Genre: oldschool minimalist dungeon crawling
  • First Impression: seeing a micro-zine like this is honestly super inspiring as a game designer, because you can really just see the absolute distilled essence of a game that then would spiral out and become something bigger. I'm looking forward to an afternoon as Kargunt!


  • 15. Last Oath, by Lucas Rolim

  • Needed to Play: 1d6, 1d20, something to record your story + a copy or sketch of the included map and character sheets
  • Genre: dungeon crawling choose your own adventure
  • First Impression: I know someone told me that there used to be a book series of choose your own adventure games that were also solo D&D or D&D-style adventures. This is that, but with the intent and assumption of multiple playthroughs. 


  • 16. Kal-Arath, by Castle Grief

  • Needed to Play: d6, something to record your story and character sheet on, a hex map (or equivalent) to chart your world.
  • Genre: weird classic pulp fantasy
  • Play Modes: solo or with friends!
  • First Impression: So I got this along with its two companion zines as a part of Castle Grief's crowdfunder. I've looked through them and I've gotta say it's pretty cool to have something that you CAN play as fully solo, or with friends using the oracle and random rolling to generate the map, and it doesn't SAY you can run it GM'd but it also doesn't not say it. It's a very vibes-based way to storytelling a weird fantasy world that I think is neat. Excited to see how it plays!


  • 17. HUNT(er/ed), by Dillin Apelyan and Meghan Cross

  • Needed to Play: for solo, 3d6, a standard deck of playing cards, a piece of paper, a token, and something to record your thoughts. For duet play, increase to 4d6. You can also replace the dice/paper/token with a hook and ring game.
  • Genre: undiscovered kink revealer, monster hunting
  • Play Modes: solo or duet!
  • First Impression: Whereas the duet version pits monster against hunter, the solo version of this game has you play someone not quite monster, not quite hunter, but definitely all conflicted as you move through accepting or denying who you are. The fact that the alternate play mode involves something sold as a drinking game which therefore means you could turn this into a drinking game for yourself or if you play it duet is ceaselessly fascinating to me. 


  • 18. Endling, by M. Allen Hall

  • Needed to Play: 2d6, a deck of tarot cards, a token, an included hexflower map, something to record your progress
  • Genre: Apocalyptic survival
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: This is, again, a beautiful object. It looks and feels like an old government manual, which I suspect was the point. This is also a game that I suspect will make me deeply, existentially sad while playing, which is to say that is is exactly my shit.


  • 19. Whisper in the Walls 2e, by Pandion Games

  • Needed to Play: a standard deck of playing cards (with jokers! wow!), 2d6, something to record your story if you want 
  • Genre: horror, exploration
  • Play Mode: Solo only
  • First Impression: In a very real sense, this appears to be a haunted house simulator. That in and of itself is pretty fucking cool, because while I know some very talented VFX artists who have made some very gruesome costumes, and I know some haunt actors who are very good at scaring people, truly nothing is scarier than the things your own mind can summon against you.


  • 20. Sin-Eater, by Anica Cihla

  • Needed to Play: candle, 2d6, something to write and sketch on, coins, included ritual mat
  • Genre: This is just what I assume it's like to go to a Catholic church service. No, I have never been to a Catholic church service, why do you ask?
  • Play Modes: Solo only.
  • First Impression: If the physical release of this game doesn't bleed when you open it, frankly I don't see the point in owning it. Speaking of bleed, this is a game that at a quick glance does more than most of the other games to force you into the life of the sin eater you are embodying. This is a game of rituals, and it is only a matter of time before it is your last. I suspect a proper session of this game is going to involve some emotional detoxing after, which is fine - but the use of ritual to bind you into the character rather than just having prompts and asking you to reflect upon them is...spicy. I will have more things to say about this later.


  • Outro

    So, some quick fun numbers:

    • roughly 25% of these games are dungeon crawlers
    • roughly 35% of these require a standard deck of playing cards
    • roughly 25% of these require a deck of tarot cards
    • roughly 50% of these are explicitly horror games, while the rest are mostly just implied horror through the background radiation horror of adventuring or self discovery
    • only one of these dips into Wretched And Alone territory - that is to say, uses a block tower
    I just think that's neat! Anyway, while the purpose of this blog isn't really to do reviews, I do think I'll post play reports for these as I make my way through them - engaging with games both in play and to understand authorial intent absolutely is within the purview of this blog, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I think I will too.


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    The Hardest Player To Please Is Yourself, Part 1: Game Hoard

     Intro      I have a small issue - which is to say, a zine. Get it? Hah! That's it folks, that's the article, see you next week.    ...