Developer: Takuma Okada
Year: 2021
Genre: Solo TTRPG

Alone on a Journey is a collection of three solo tabletop rpgs with a focus on exploration. The collection is divided into three games. Alone Among the Stars is a solo game where you explore outer space and check out various planets. Alone in the Ancient City has you exploring the districts of an old city. Both of these were previously released games along with a new game, Alone Among the Shifting Trees, which has you exploring a mysterious forest and documenting the strange objects you find there. Each game is played with a journal, a standard deck of 52 cards, and a six-sided die. The three games have slight mechanical differences but the core part of each game is having you draw cards from the deck for prompts to describe the object you just found.

The collection also contains tips for making your own hack, or mod, of these games. The tabletop rpg community is very friendly towards people making their own versions of games and being allowed to distribute them, and the author of this game even put together a list on Itch of games based on Alone Among the Stars, featuring a couple of mine.

The book itself has a very clean and easily readable layout, with cute illustrations between each game to help provide some separation and know where they start and end.

I’m assuming that much better writing about the games exist elsewhere but I just played Along Among the Shifting Trees and wanted to use this post as an excuse to praise all three games. The three games are similar but even outside of the different themes I think there are enough differences mechanically to make it worth playing all three. They’re very relaxing games that I think are excellent examples of tabletop rpgs being more than just dungeon crawlers where you kill monsters, as well as examples of ttrpgs that aren’t using the traditional game master and 3-5 players structure.

Alone Among the Stars may also be one of the most important games I’ve ever played. While I had made games before playing it, it did lead me down the rabbit hole of making solo ttrpgs and then other games because making hacks of it is so approachable and encouraged. You can check out the released of Alone Among the Stars along with a 2-player version and Game Boy and Twine ports on Itch.io. I think all three games are lovely though and would encourage you to check them out if you want to have a relaxing experience creating your own worlds.

Alone on a Journey is available on Itch.io.