I printed a copy of Courier months ago, but hadn't gotten around to actually starting it until yesterday. Let me put it this way: in a single turn of Courier, you might draw 1-4 cards from a standard deck. It wasn't until I was turning over the last card in the stack that I realized about three hours had zoomed by while I was tracing my plucky pal's path through  wilds of New North America and its wastelands, caves, competing factions, and bizarre anomalies. I have tinkered around with many a solo-first RPG, and this one hit me right in the joy-place.

While I have loved many a journaling RPG (Apo/pawthecaria will always be my heart's delight), Courier cuts away the chaff and refines the solo format into something that's just crunchy enough, just atmospheric enough, just open enough, and just structured enough - for my taste, anyway. If you want to journal this, there's a lot of meat to dig into; if you want a bird's-eye view of a narrative without getting into NaNoWriMo word counts, Courier is what you (and I!) have been looking for.

The core loop is clearly outlined, quick to step through, and highly compelling. It's got ideal pick-up-and-put-down timing: a turn takes five minutes or less, but every turn makes tangible progress. The Fallout-meets-Caves-of-Qud setting and vibe are pitch-perfect and have just the right amount of detail to give you the gist of each faction, but with plenty of hooks if you want to build them out more specifically. There are easy ways to generate immediate goals (namely, quests), but you're never put on rails, and nothing I've encountered has strict time limits. (EDIT: Forgot to mention that the combat is ideally tailored for the game - I wouldn't call it deep, but it's also not the focus of the game, so that doesn't bother me. I like a game that gets creative with challenges.) Every turn generates at least one interesting decision, and usually several.

The only minor issue I've encountered is that the rules are a little bit scattered across the book, leading to a lot of flipping around. That's hardly out of the ordinary for this kind of publication - information like this is hard to organize both cleanly and sensibly, and this is without question in the top 10% of the rulebooks I've read in terms of clarity. Just know ahead of time (as the author has acknowledged) that there are maybe a couple spots where the flow could have been improved. I'm planning to make myself a little cheat sheet, specifically around what actions affect my fame/infamy with each faction.

The only major issue I've encountered is that I already want more! It's not that there isn't enough to do - this'll keep me occupied for weeks, and it's tremendous value for the money. I just already like it so much that I want more equipment, more customizations, more quests, more anomalies, more systems to layer on. An eminently hackable system, it even includes a very promising list of suggestions and cut ideas for stuffing new ideas into the game. So that's fantastic, and as soon as I'm done writing this comment I'm going to go poke around and see what hacks and expansions I can find. Great game, can't recommend it enough!