First Impressions: The Questgiver
(There is also a Quest Giver quest generator on itch which I may review eventually).

( Game Description )

Long game is long. Long game also needs a setting and characters and I have hundreds of games that I could play; and dozens that I really WANT to play. I also have three games I am currently meddling with, plus one I’m DMing, plus one I want to DM.

And… this is a story of betrayal. If I get it right and immerse myself, it will most likely break my heart. Right now, with the world on fire as it is, I am not seeking out heartbreak.

I am putting this game on ice until a time when I have the mental resilience to commit to a long-form game with guaranteed sadness.

What I’ve seen so far, I likes. This has 70+ pages of content, which means you’re not just shoved into a situation and told to cope; you get advice for each stage of the game and clear instructions. This puts it head and shoulders above other games for me.

Unreview: Kafka’s Cheeseburger

( Game Description )

This, unfortunately, was one of the first solo games I encountered and it put me off them for a good while.

It has an interesting mechanic where you roll a d12 for results but might be able to choose between more than one category: 1, prime, divisible by 3/4/5, so 5 can be ‘prime’ or ‘divisible by 5’
Unfortunately all prompts are cheeseburger-related.
You journal ‘this happens, what do I do’ and keep rolling until you reach an exit condition.

It’s a whimsical little thing that should not take too long to complete, but even turning this into a cheese-free vegan experience without tomatoes and without the bun (hold the ketchup) I cannot bring myself to ‘play’.

I am, in fact, so repulsed by it that a new verdict was born. I don’t actually hate spiders.

Playthrough/Review: Significant Otters

( Game Description )

There really isn’t much there there. You choose items from a 5x5 matrix (this is entirely flavour text), you roll the dice, you add up, you’re done. The game can be played in under a minute. It can possibly be stretched out if you want to imagine the life of an otter, but I don’t think I will pick this up again.

Playthrough/Review: Dig Dive Duel

( Game Description )

I reached the end without realising in less than five minutes. Next time, I’ll check the page count (24). I mean, it was kinda fun, but there’s not much there here. I definitely preferred the Shakespeare mechanics where you at least have stats and an inventory and roll for combat.

First Impressions The Cog That Remains
(Find it in the current No ICE Bundle)

( Game Description )

It's not the game, it's me. It really is. I love the system – you get 52 (and here, 54) prompts which come up randomly; you have the additional Jenga tower mechanic (which I play with a paper equivalent since a physical tower would be less fair), but this type of game demands that you create your own story. Which is great.

But.

Firstly, I am strapped for time. I would like to try a second dedicated solo adventure this month. Then I'm poking at a Scarlet Heroes hexcrawl/wilderness adventure (and am learning a lot from that), and from time to time I poke at a freeform adventure (I have no system I play with or character stats; I'll add them when I need them, but so far, I'm just exploring).

Plus I'm downloading the _No ICE_ bundle (page 15 of 48; see link above) and despite a lot of games being duplicates, Windows-only, or for systems I have no interest in (eg Mothership) that's still A LOT of games to glance at and save.

This is a game about keeping a giant mecha running. I'd struggle coming up with appropriate stories about maintaining a car, but at least I've owned cars for many decades and done _some_ maintenance, and know what you use a car for.

I know nothing about giant mechas and their pilots, and after a week of staring at my first prompts and not coming up with anything useful, I have to conclude that this game needs more prep and more story brain than I am able to give it.

Which is a shame. Prompts like
Something about the Mecha’s original construction was flawed. Pull from the tower. What limb, part, or system simply doesn’t work the way it should? How do you jury-rig a solution?
sound like they will create great stories – there's just enough substance here to spark imagination and not enough to feel railroaded.

I, however, am in the 'wait, they have limbs? What kind of limbs' stage; I have no knowledge of my own to link this prompt to, and this game feels like work. Work that I am not willing to put in, not while other settings/stories sound so much more interesting.

So, with some reluctance, I am letting this go, or rather, putting it on ice in the hope that one day I may feel bored and curious enough to go back to it.

Playthrough/Review: Shakespeare vs Cthulhu: What Dreams May Come

( Game Description )

I played through this and I only cheated twice. Once because I lost 13 rolls in a row against a much weaker opponent (still won the fight, but barely, and, really: that is not a good mechanic), and once because the game threw instadeath at me, which isn’t gameplay: if you present something as a viable option, it should be viable.

In the end, this is a gamebook: while you roll dice and make decisions, a lot of decisions are either meaningless for players (turn left or right) and the book contains a lot of ‘you do this, that, and the other, which do you do now’ – dialogue is written for you, decisions are made for you, and at the end of a scene you eventually DO get a choice, but it still feels very, very railroady, and I found it impossible to identify with the character even in my usual third person/shoulder cam perspective.

So those are faults that are part of the system itself, and while you probably can execute this better or worse, the flaws are inherent in the system.

What’s not inherent is that this is a PDF without anchors so when it says ‘go to 437’ you have to scroll manually to 437, which means there is always a chance you catch a sentence or two from other sections, which may or may not lead to spoilers. In many ways, this would be better suited to a video game or a PDF where every section sits on its own page.
Particularly annoying is that the introduction tells you that there are sections hidden within the game text, which just encourages you to read ahead.
This could have been solved much better.

I’ve also come across one incontinuity, and many plot threads are never resolved.

Plus I hoped to spend a little more time in some of the plays and found myself whisked away quickly.


This experience played out more or less as I expected. I had one ‘choose your own adventure’ book as a kid and didn’t find it very interesting then; this one had a few more choices and a few more stats plus an actual rolling/card pulling mechanism, but it still steamrolled you in places, and the fundamental structural issues are inbuilt so that a different author cannot make them go away.

All in all I am not unhappy I grabbed this in a sale (I have another gamebook hanging around somewhere that I picked up for a dollar), but while there are choices, this barely matches the definition of ‘roleplaying’,

I may go through this again in a few years, and after a couple of playthroughs, I probably will satisfy my curiosity by reading it.

I played this for most of the month – not as my only game, but I picked it up most days and continued until I was bored or had no idea which choice I should take. (Some choices seemed very obvious. Which doesn't mean I would have been right about them.) I did have fun, but more in a 'I skimmed a not very good novel' than in a roleplaying way.

Edited the 'Speciality Cards and Dice' section of Agents of Chaos with the following:


Speciality Cards and Dice
I haven’t yet encountered any games that specifially rely on a custom resource, but you can get decks with pieces of dungeons, cards that determine how an NPC will react to your character, so I felt they deserved an honourable mention.


At some point, I picked up a set of seven dice and I have been using some of them in my freeform solo play:

– Direction (d8, N/NE/E etc)
– Weather (d10, Sunny, Cloudy etc)
– Wilderness Terrain (d 12, this includes not only standard terrains but trails, towns, and castles/ruins)
– Random Emotion (d12, though some are very close, like attracted/flirting and sad/apathy, but I'm trying this out for first encounters with random NPCs)
– Dungeon Terrain (d12, from corridors to obstacles and traps)
– Dungeon Feature (d12, statues, wells, doors etc)
– Treasure (d8, potions, magical and non-magical items etc)


I've been finding it much easier to roll a die than to consult tables, and while I'll probably pivot to either a Hexflower or the Scarlet Heroes method of terrain creation in the longer run, being able to quickly create something randome instead of having to think (and overthink) or reach for the same old same old has definitely made my life more fun.

SemiReview: Scarlet Heroes

First, a trigger warning.
Previously, I have skipped over horror games because I don’t do horror. This is a dark fantasy game (post-apocalyptic within its world: a lot of bad stuff happened, lands were overrun, they had to settle in one small corner of the world) and like a lot of old-school games, it’s dark.

This one is extra dark, and after reading the built-in scenario I decided not to play within this world and I will skip the provided starter adventure. I am also not going to use the provided monsters because while some of them are your standard scary things, one random find was decidedly icky, I’m not going to give you a precise trigger warning because that would give the game away and spread the ick.

Mechanically, there’s a lot to like about Scarlet Heroes. From a setting point of view, I see no reason to choose this over a thousand other heroic fantasy settings.

( Game Description )

All in all, I like this much better than Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC); I want to try these rules to try and convert an existing adventure; I can see myself using the tables and the DM advice; I can see myself using the character I rolled up in a world where they aren't doomed to fail right from the outset. (I would not have created this character if I'd known more of the backstory. I thought I was creating an outsider, not someone who will be killed on sight in most of the setting.)

Reading this book has given me a much better understanding of how old-fashioned DnD worked in principle/game loop; I now have a better idea on how to create magic items for games that just say 'the gamemaster will make everything up, have fun', and I've taken a lot of notes on various aspects of adventure design, loot distribution, etc.

I can also see using the tables provided to spark inspiration; there's just enough content without, for the most part, being too restrictive.

The Scenario Table (3x 20 different scenarios for Urban, Wilderness and Dungeon settings) looks to hit the sweet spot for me, for instance: there are enough details in the description that something is likely to rattle something loose in my brain without feeling constrained by them, and while I am not interested in running crime adventures (most of the Urban tables are full of crimes), I want to try the game loop since it sounds super useful; I think it will solve one of my problems with how to set up adventures (but that, I think, will have to wait for another post).

All in all, I don't regret buying this, I just wish it was kinder.

(And yes, this is complex enough that a new tag was born, the semi-review. This is far more than first impressions, but it's also not a full review as I haven't actually played anything yet.)

Edited Agents of Chaos with the following:

Books
Some people collect random snippets from books and use them as oracles. I’ve seen
– a name for a character (first name they come across)
– borrow an event (this works best with gothic/fantasy novels, but mysteries can work, too. This is where you get the trapdoor or the weird smell or the hostile villagers or _something_ and incorporate them into your game.
– spark table (you roll for a location: page/line) and use those words instead of a table of random words

I have also glanced at a number of games that are based on novels, but haven’t studied the actual mechanism of gameplay.


There seems to be a number of games based on using books as a randomiser; if they come up and the mechanism is worth examining, I will update the master list further.

https://itch.io/b/3481/solo-but-not-alone-6

I promise I can stop any time.

This is definitely a bundle of solo games, and I’m getting the ‘my dance card is full’ feeling; yes, a lot of these games look very yummy, but so did the last two bundles I’ve posted and there will always be more interesting games.

I have around 80 games in last year’s bundle, and several more bundles to go through. I *do* feel I’m making progress, but at the (maximum, unrealistic) rate of 1 game a day, I probably have a couple of years’ worth of itch.io bundle games. Never mind games I got from elsewhere, solo play I’m improvising, and games I play with others.

One thing this does is cure me of FOMO. Not yet in the ‘must buy all the things’ sense; I am not quite at the point where I will not buy a dedicated solo bundle; but I’m no longer buying other games even if they’re just a quid (or a couple of quid).

But now that I have them, I find myself wanting to process them, and having made a good start (I have done reviews, however short, of 40+ games) I want to continue, so I can reduce my mental load.

That means being ruthless. My ‘one topic a month’ project is not going too well; I got side-tracked this month and started on a different game so I’ll have to re-configure everything, and I’ve found a few more games/game styles that I wanted to add, so I’m now looking at September 2027, and I’m not even *trying* to find themes.

But there’s also a tremendous sense of achievement, of taming a mountain of STUFF and turning it into a library of choices; I’m starting to get a feel for which mechanisms work for me; what I like to do when I’m out of brain, what I want to borrow for a longer campaign maybe, how I can augment my practice.

In the long run I think I’ll end up with a pile of solo journalling things along the lines of Froggy Hat, With Iron Teeth or The Disguised Frog - good, wholesome, short fun. (This selection picked by scrolling down the list of reviews); but also hopefully with a pile of games that can form the baseline for longer adventures/more in-depth stories.

In the end I suspect I will end up in a similar space as Geek Gamer in this video – not with the exact resources, but with a similar pattern of I pick a general feel, I find a way to get the story started, pick a ruleset, build a character, and do some worldbuilding in any order.

While it's only fair (and educational) to play each solo game as it is intended (games not intended to be soloed will need amendments anyway) in the end, I see myself taking note what I particularly like about each game and then taking the best bits and making a story from them.

I'm not there yet, but I'm getting closer.