Happy 2023! I decided to pull all the reviews I wrote of games available on Itch over the course of 2022 and put them in one convenient place! All of these were taken directly from my website, The Cozy Cauldron. If you like what you read, please consider throwing it a follow!
From Mythical Mystery Games come The Northwood Fables: Volume 1 – The Ghost of Northwood House. Available on Itch for $10.0USD or more, Northwood House comes with everything you need to run this mystery party game as a group, or on your own!
This was good fun. Some people had truly hilarious voices for their characters and talking over the whodunnit at the end is a great time! It’s just fun to puzzle out together and requires truly minimal amounts of prep (read about your character, decide if you’re going to do a voice and, if so, what that sound like – you’re done, yay!). We had two people spectating this game who will be joining u next time. Took us about 90 minutes in all and everyone was very excited to play again at month’s end!
From Jei D. Marcade comes One Day at a Thyme. This cozy, whimsical solo journaling game sees you playing the inhabitant of a cottage in a magical world, and is available on Itch as a Pay What You Want (PWYW) product, with a suggested price of $5.00USD.
To play you’ll need a d6, a deck of playing cards, and something to write in/with! There’s even an expansion for the game now called One Night at a Thyme: Spooky Season, which can be played independently should you wish!
I’m looking forward to setting up my cottage, and then telling the adventure of my witch! I think I’m going to use this game to get a better feel for a character who has been rolling around in my head lately.
After playing: I decided to use this game to get a better feel for a character who has been rolling around in my head for the last few weeks. She’s a fairy who lives in a small town under protection of the hags. I decided ahead of time that I was going to play for an in-game week and this, along with the game encouraging you not to pressure yourself into writing long entries all the time, made it extra enjoyable! The combination of prompts and rolls, along with an undetermined number of events happening per day, gave a nice sense of pacing to the week. If you have a few hours, One Day At A Thyme is a great way to spend some of them!
From Monroeroe we’ve got Beneath the Canopy, an Over the Garden Wall inspired journaling game for 1-3 players. It is currently on sale for $7.50USD on Itch, and you can pick it- and a bunch of other games – up as part of Monroe’s Wedding Bells sale for $15.00USD!
I’ll be playing this one as solo journaling game, and if I’m really luck the new tarot deck I ordered will be here in time (doubtful, with shipping being what it is, but this would be a lovely way to start its use!). I’m not sure about my character for this on yet! Maybe I’ll use Éabha, my Witcher inspired lass, before she started her training. We’ll see! Characters are always what I get stuck on the most!
After playing: I played this as Lesaine, my Eberron character as a “my good friend Greshel dropped me in someone else’s forest to learn about fear” and it was delightful. This was another one where I had decided I was going to pull seven cards and, if Lesaine hadn’t won or lost by then, her story was going to end with hanging out in the forest, trapped, for longer than she would have liked. As it happened, I pull the winning card on my last day! I think this game did a great job of channelling the atmosphere of its inspiration and allowed me to play in a fun space of “something’s not quite right” and a creeping, building sense of horror.
Also from Mythical Mystery Games come The Northwood Fables: Volume 2 – Boardroom Siege. Available on Itch for $10.0USD or more, Boardroom Siege comes with everything you need to run this mystery party game as a group, or on your own!
This is going to be the third Northwood Fables game I’m playing, having run the Prologue in September and Volume 1 earlier in October. The additional twists uncovered over the last two games have sent me reeling, and the writing allows for moments of “wait is this person X?” and the answer, usually, is yes. It’s nice to get together and laugh with a group of friends for a game that nobody really has to do any prep for! There’s no stress!
Because it’s a busy weekend, we decided to postpone this one until later this year! (Jan edit: we ran this at the end of December with 8 people total and once again had an absolute blast. It took us a little over an hour to play and hearing all the voices, and people talking about their guesses for the guilty party, is fantastic. I'm in the process of scheduling our next game.)
First up is Orbital. When I first read through it I was reminded of Hugh Howley’s Silo series. Has it been a number of years since I read these books? Yes. Did the “everything is bad out there but by working together in here we will survive” vibe immediately make me connect the two? Also yes. The world of Orbital is not utopic by any means, but part of its premise is that everyone believes in this thing bigger than themselves: the station.
The tone of the game is thus quite appealing to me, and the physical feel of it was lovely as well. The interior pages have satisfying feel that is more textured than usual book pages. The cover is similar, and I love that is using blue ink. I found it much easier to read, and the blue and gold together on off-white pages looks beautiful.
Orbital is a GMless game, but it does have a Facilitator who has a firmer grasp of the rules and introduces the game to everyone else. From there, it’s time for collaborative storytelling in a turn-based system! The game opens and closes with minor scenes from each player where your character is just… being. It’s nice that each character gets to open in a way that humanizes them individually, and that at game’s close we return to these individual lives and how the character has changed over the story’s course. I find it charming!
I found myself with several questions as I went through Orbital, thinking I’d have them answered later. I did not! But that’s okay, because a quick search on Itch brought me to Mousehole Press, where I found out I just need to e-mail the creator to get the digital files I don’t presently have. You do need the digital files to play the game, and I’m glad to have quickly resolved my momentary panic of “wait, am I missing things? I’m definitely missing things oh no!”
Orbital is a neat little volume, and I like the ‘working together’ world it creates. There isn’t anything cozy about threats to the station’s existence, but there is something human and warm about how the game encourages you to share a meal together before playing, if you can. In a game about community, and saving it, that was a nice addition.
Zero Void is very much not about saving your community! It’s the opposite to Orbital in several ways: glossy cover and pages, has a GM, and it’s stated outright that your group is way more likely to die than survive – great, cool, no stress! (Some stress, a fair bit of stress)
The premise of Zero Void is that you’ve just botched a robbery and the imperium is on your heels. You’re racing against the clock to get out of the system, and you and your crew are all equally terrible people. To make matters even more interesting there is a mechanic actively encouraging players to make things more difficult for one another… and easier for themselves in the process. Will you stick with your crew, or save your own skin? The choice is yours! Do you trust that they’ll watch your back if you watch theirs?
I like this one because everything you need is right here in the volume. I’m not super keen on the glossy page texture because it picks up oils immediately but do think the finish adds to the overall futuristic feel of the game. I think I’d want to make photocopies of several pages so that each player had physical copies of the information they need – something that’s easier to solve with a digital file. That said, I’m quite happy to have the physical version!
Zero Void is also neat because you get the roles and stats for possible characters, but no other information about them besides “you’re all awful”. I do feel that these dynamics could be a lot of fun, and that the game itself would be an absolute blast. I also know that for me, because of the ‘everyone for themselves’ and the exceptionally likely chance that the players die, the idea of running this one causes me a little bit of stress! Regardless, Zero Void was a great read and the world felt very complete. It does a great job of keeping the tension and pressure up, and I think the story possibilities for an evening of chaos are as vast as space itself.
From David Jensen (Stories Tavern), Monster Adoption Center is a GMless RPG designed for small groups (2-3) or solo play. Light-hearted, cozy, and open-ended, M.A.C. is straightforward to set up, allowing you to jump right into gameplay!
I received a complimentary copy for review purposes and will always be transparent about times where this happens!
Monster Adoption Center has you or your group working together to build an adoption center, and then find your bundles of joy their forever homes. After figuring out your center (where it is, what it looks like, the general feel of it), you move onto character creation. M.A.C. has no limits on what you can play, or who you can be: even three slimes in a trench coat fit in here!
Once you know a bit about your character you move onto their stats. In this game you’re using PECK – that’s Patience, Empathy, Communication, and Knowledge. These determine things like whether your character will rush through a task just to see it done, or if you’re able to communicate the needs of the Monsters to their prospective Carers. And if you’re particularly adept at Communicating with Monsters? You won’t be as strong with Communicating with Carers! It’s a neat way to balance stats.
With that, you’re ready to jump into gameplay. In the Gameplay Loop you have the choice of four actions built around the idea of getting these monsters comfortable and then to their new homes! What the monsters look like, their likes and dislikes, are all up to the collaborative storytelling of the table!
That M.A.C. is GMless is a definite bonus for me, and I like that it is explicitly for solo or small group sessions! We all know how difficult scheduling can be, so having games where it’s explicitly said that you’re only looking to coordinate with 1-2 other people, or none at all if you go the solo route, is wonderful!
Safety Tools! Right at the start of the book there are suggestions for safety tools for general use in multiplayer games. I appreciated that this light-hearted game mentions it being everyone’s responsibility to keep the table comfortable and safe.
The example gameplay loop was VERY helpful, I love when games do this as I sometimes have trouble visualizing based on instructions alone!
This is a GMless game, so this might seem like a strange section to still be including! This part of my brain doesn’t shut off however, so when reading M.A.C. one of the first things that came to mind was how incredibly fun it would be to have one of my DnD parties play this. Not the players, but for our characters to play this game in-universe as a bonding activity during down-time for some low-stakes, laid back, relationship building fun.
Finding ways to work supplements and games into ongoing campaigns is something I frequently try to make work. While it’s fun to drop in other supplements and games as side quests, it can eat into session time if things go long. But if it’s the characters themselves playing a given game? They can stop playing whenever! This idea doesn’t work for everything, of course, but it does work for M.A.C. and so one of my groups will be playing this in-character sometime in the new year!
I need to mention the colour scheme! It was nice and light, easy on the eyes and combined with the page borders had this childlike sense of wonder to it that I felt fit the general themes of the games beautifully. The monster art throughout the book is very charming!
I would love to share a table with some of my younger cousins and play this with them. I just know that the monsters coming into our center would be incredible, and there would be a lot of laughter over their likes and dislikes. M.A.C. really strikes me as a game which benefits from the players not taking themselves too seriously and instead leaning into the limitless creativity and potential silliness that could come up in the course of storytelling.
Monster Adoption Center is available on Itch for $4.95USD [here]. This is Tavern Stories’ first Itch release, and there are plans for a second game which will be a cooperative TTRPG about a retirement home, telling stories and reliving memories hopefully in the new year! To keep up with Tavern Stories, see previous releases and more, head on over to Carrd [here].
Like these reviews? Want to help the Cauldron keep on bubbling? Become a Cauldron Companion on Ko-fi or Patreon!
Did you like this post? Tell us
Leave a comment
Log in with your itch.io account to leave a comment.