Talkin' 'Bout Tiny Games

Rapid-fire Recs

Hey! Haven’t done one of these in a while. This time around, I thought I’d cover tabletop RPGs, a category of game which I’ve always wanted to cover, but the fact of my relative inexperience with them (and much less one single title) compared to video games has always held me back from doing a full issue spotlight. So, without further ado: five TTRPGs that also don’t require a GM!

Moss Creeps, Stone Crumbles

Moss Creeps, Stone Crumbles is a very rules-light and casual friendly TTRPG about documenting a clearing over the course of a century in five year increments. One player first draws a simple image, and then the next player writes a short caption for it. The player who wrote the caption then draws an image from the clearing five years later, and the next player writes a caption for them, looping back to the first player once everyone’s had a go, until 20 of these writing/drawing pairs have been made.

The collaborate storytelling process is a quietly companionable one, as the focus on a location allows your story to escape the traditional framing around Ego and instead explore a biological network of sorts. As drawings don’t need to be of the clearing as a whole, players can and will flit between small elements, with various landmarks or animals or flowers making appearances and reappearances over the course of decades.

And, at the end, you have a physical record of your little clearing that you can keep – the game suggests dividing up a single piece of paper into 20 sections, but my artist’s nature insists it be played on 10 double-sided sheets so it’s easier to turn into a book.

• 2-20 players, GMless
• $1.00 USD
  
• ~1.5-2 hours

The Ground Itself

If you want a game set in a single location over a certain advancing timeframe that doesn’t dictate a specific setting, then The Ground Itself does that. Here the world is brainstormed by the players, and then dice roll determines the timeframe – whether the landscape inches forward by a scale of days or millennia. This second bit means that a setting such as a high school could be rendered very different after a single round of the game. The players then draw cards from the deck and answer card specific prompts, after which the time advance is triggered.

Compared to Moss Creeps, Stone Crumbles, The Ground Itself is not focused on images (being a text-oriented game) and snapshot moments, but more concrete systems of culture, society, and history – the world I created was not a collage of scenes but instead a realized world whose various incarnations in time I could use as a setting for a story, or even another TTRPG. So if you want to follow the concrete history of a place, give it a shot.

• 2-5 players, GMless
• $5.00 USD
  
• ~3 hours

I Groom Turtles and My Partner Degausses Birds. Our Budget is 1.5 Million.

While Moss Creeps and Ground generally treat their loci with some level of solemn respect, I Groom Turtles absolutely does not. The basic pitch of it is that it’s a parody of Househunters and similar shows – asking the two players playing as the couple to come up with the ‘whitest name they can think of’ for their partner, and for them to come up with what style of house they want independent of each other. There’s also the deathless spectres. Because one thing the realtor has failed to note about the property they’re selling to the other players is that it’s haunted. And as they take the couple through the house, and the couple argue about what renovations they want to make to the rooms, the deathless spectres will have the renovations of their own.

I Groom Turtles’ humor emerges in the melodrama of house selection as mediated by reality TV, as the players stand true to the naked absurdity of their desires for the house in verbal combat negotiation for the final renovation plans. In the end, after the laughter had died down, my friends and I had a floorplan that was an utterly ridiculous hodgepodge of desired features and the frustrating compromises taken to get them, for everyone human and not.

• 4+ players, GMless
• Free
• ~1 hour

/dia

However, if you’re less interested in places so much as people, or you don’t have anyone around to play TTRPGs with you, or you want a game that goes quick, /dia is a solo TTRPG about writing the singular moment of a character facing imminent death in segmented increments. I hesitate to say much more, as the unfolding format of the rulebook does a lot for the tone and pace of the game, and aside from that a lot of its draw is in its short length. What I can say is that the subject matter is well-suited to the micro size, and for its duration, I was caught up in the world of my character. If you’re still unsure about the idea of a solo TTRPG and ‘journaling games’, this is a complete experience without a large time investment.

• 1 player
• $3.00 USD
  
• 30 minutes

Six Figures Under

But if you want a solo TTRPG game that’s longer and wherein the presence of death isn’t a climactic single moment but instead part of the job, Six Figures Under is a game of vignettes about being a freelance necromancer. In it, you write about facets of the job such as fulfilling a client’s request or carefully writing an Ad on Craigslist that can bypass its word-based content filters. That second vignette is also exemplary of the game’s epistolary focus. In all but one of the vignettes, the writing you’re doing isn’t of a framed narrative, but of in-universe documents – the one about fulfilling a client’s request is specifically a journal entry. If you like the freelance work take on a usually mystical job, or an epistolary-focused TTRPG, check it out.

• 1 player
• $1.00 USD
  
• ~1-2 hours