Six gentle journaling RPGs you play alone with a notebook, a deck of cards and an evening, plus what each one needs and costs.
A young witch delivering parcels for a year, a tea shop at the edge of the world, an apothecary curing village ailments. Cozy solo RPGs are slow, warm story games you play with a journal, a cup of tea and a deck of cards.
The table is small. A notebook, a deck of playing cards, one or two dice, and something hot to drink. You draw a card, read the prompt it points to, and write a few lines about what your character did that day. Then you draw again, and an hour later you have a short chapter nobody else will ever need to read.
The genre has a name — solo journaling RPGs — and a more decorated back catalogue than its gentleness suggests. Koriko: A Magical Year won The Awards 2024 and took two ENNIE silvers. Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop won ARPIA's Best Rule System in 2023 and was a Dicebreaker finalist the same year. The Librarian's Apprentice won the 2024 CRIT Award for Best Solo TTRPG. If the whole idea of playing a tabletop game on your own is new, the wider map of how solo tabletop roleplaying works and the four ways people play it is worth reading first.
What separates the cozy corner from the rest is the missing fail state. There is no party to keep alive and no clock running down. The cards introduce weather, customers, ailments and small complications, and your job is to decide what they meant and write it down. That is why these games keep turning up in comment threads as somebody's first roleplaying game of any kind.
Koriko: A Magical Year, by Jack Harrison at Mousehole Press, is the one most people are pointed at first. You play a teenage witch spending a year away from home in a city you invent as you go, openly modelled on Kiki's Delivery Service. The story runs in six volumes of an hour or two each, and when a moment turns risky you add a die to a growing stack — which resets once it reaches twenty-one, assuming it survives that long. It wants a tarot deck, a pile of dice and a journal; the designer confirms a regular deck covers most prompts, but the characters you meet are named after the major arcana.
Last Tea Shop, by Spring Villager, is the cheapest way to find out whether this hobby is for you, because the classic edition is free. You run a tea stall on the border between the living and the dead, serving the recently deceased one last hot drink and recording what they tell you. It asks for an hour or so of quiet, pen and paper, one or two six-sided dice, and tea — listed on the page as optional but recommended. Play ends when the Veiled One arrives.
Apothecaria, by Anna Blackwell, is the long-haul option. You are the village witch of High Rannoc, brewing potions for villagers and monsters who turn up with complaints like Fairy Fever and Yeti Chest, while working out what happened to the witch who vanished before you. It needs a deck of cards with the jokers left in, a journal and a pen, and no dice at all. The designer calls it a long-term game, and one player reports filling five 80-page notebooks and still going.
Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop, by lostwaysclub, is the densest of these. You run a bookshop on a barge, paddling between ten riverside towns through five seasons of holidays and animalfolk regulars, with a fishing minigame on the side. It is 226 pages, illustrated by Linnea Sterte, and played with a deck of cards, a twenty-sided die and a six-sided die.
Alone Among the Stars, by Takuma Okada, is the ancestor most of the others quote. You land on a planet, draw cards, and describe what you find. It is pay-what-you-want, uses a 52-card deck and a single d6, and the designer says he generally plays for no more than fifteen to thirty minutes at a time — which makes it the one to reach for on a weeknight when a full evening is not available.
The Librarian's Apprentice, by Almost Bedtime Theater, gives you the tightest structure of the six: retrieve six documents from an infinite, shifting library before the day is out. You build the library as a map of playing cards on the table, so it needs a flat surface along with a deck, two six-sided dice, a token and something to write in. The page states 60 to 90 minutes, and the character sheet is a bookmark.
Resist buying all six. These games reward being finished rather than sampled, and the sensible pattern is to play one book until it is done or nearly done before adding another. If you want the full gear list rather than the game list, the solo journaling RPG starter kit covers what to have on the table.
Digital prices are the minimum asked on the designers' own storefronts.
| Game and maker | What you need | Typical length | Digital price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koriko: A Magical Year — Jack Harrison | Tarot deck, stack of dice, journal | Six volumes, 1–2 hours each | $18 |
| Last Tea Shop Classic — Spring Villager | Pen, paper, 1–2 d6 | About an hour | Free, pay what you want |
| Apothecaria — Anna Blackwell | Card deck with jokers, journal, pen | Long-term, many sessions | $13 |
| Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop — lostwaysclub | Card deck, d20, d6, journal | Long-term, five seasons | $17 |
| Alone Among the Stars — Takuma Okada | 52-card deck, one d6 | 15–30 minutes | Free, pay what you want |
| The Librarian's Apprentice — Almost Bedtime Theater | Card deck, 2 d6, token, flat surface | 60–90 minutes | $5 |
The set-up is half the appeal and worth doing deliberately. One cleared surface, the deck squared beside the journal, dice somewhere they will not roll onto the floor, the cup within reach but not on the page. Experienced players are near-unanimous on one layout trick: keep the mechanics and the story apart. One described using a notepad with a wide left margin, tracking rolls and oracle questions down the left and writing the fiction on the right, with sections at the back for characters met and threads left open.
Then let the writing be bad. The consensus among people who do this regularly is that polish is not the goal — quick notes, half-sentences and shorthand icons for recurring resources all count as playing. Several keep sticky notes and index cards to hand for ideas they do not want to commit to the page yet. If the finished journal matters to you as an object, this is where the habits of building a book out of scraps and ephemera transfer almost directly: ticket stubs, pressed leaves and pasted images do the work that illustrations would.
Structure helps on the longer games. Apothecaria and Fox Curio both run for months, and by session twelve you will want to find the character you invented in session three. An index at the front and numbered pages is the whole solution, which is to say the core of a working bullet journal setup applies without modification.
The pen is the one piece worth being fussy about, because it is the thing your hand is doing for an hour. Fineliners are the default in this hobby for archival ink and clean thin lines. If writing by hand is the part you are actually here for, a first fountain pen setup changes the texture of the evening more than any upgrade to the game itself.
Two small purchases solve problems you will otherwise meet twice. Most of these games ship print-friendly PDFs and separate sheets — stall sheets, character sheets, trackers, trifolds — so a home printer earns its keep quickly, and the portable inkless thermal printers that take full-size letter or A4 thermal paper do the same job without cartridges. And if rolling dice across an open notebook bothers you, a dice tray contains them; a dice tower is the popular alternative, and the two are often sold as one combined unit.
Reality: players who do this weekly describe their journals as notes, drafts and scribbles, and one put it as the game living somewhere between your pen and the book you are reading from rather than in the prose itself. Shorthand symbols, bullet fragments and doodles are all normal output.
Reality: only one of the six games here is built around tarot, and its designer says a regular deck covers most of the prompts — the major arcana only matter because the characters are named after them. Every other game listed runs on a standard 52-card deck, with one asking that you leave the jokers in.
Reality: the cozy label describes the tone, not the depth. One of these runs to 226 pages with five seasons, ten towns and a fishing minigame, and players routinely post rules questions that designers answer in public — including a player-built flowchart of the play loop that the designer then endorsed.
The same format runs cold as easily as warm, and the two best-known examples are worth knowing about even if you never play them. Thousand Year Old Vampire, by Tim Hutchings, runs to 188 pages and follows a single vampire across centuries of prowling, feeding and forgetting what it used to be. Its own page offers it as a couple of hours or a couple of weeks of play, solo, with group play as an option.
The Wretched, by Chris Bissette, trades comfort for physical dread: you are the last surviving crew member of a salvage ship adrift between stars after something came aboard, and you play with a deck of cards, a microphone and a tumbling block tower. Part of the game is literally balanced on the table in front of you, which is not a sensation the tea shop will ever give you. It is the same evening ritual — one person, one deck, one record of what happened — pointed somewhere much less comfortable.
None of these games ship with components you cannot buy ordinarily. These are the five things worth owning once rather than replacing badly each time you start a new book.
A hardcover notebook with a faint dot grid instead of ruled lines, so the same page takes handwriting one evening and a small map the next. Heavier paper around 100 gsm stops fineliner ink showing through to the reverse side. Look for a cover that stays shut on its own and a page count you will not exhaust in a fortnight.
A set of pigment-ink fineliners spanning hairline to broad nibs. The ink is archival and water-resistant once dry, so pages survive a knocked cup and hold their contrast over the months a long game takes. The spread of widths matters more than the count: one fine nib for body text and one broader nib for headings covers most of what a journal needs.
Two standard 52-card decks, each including its two jokers. An air-cushion finish lets the cards separate cleanly when you shuffle one-handed next to an open notebook. A second deck earns its place quickly, because several of these games ask you to set cards aside as a running map or a cast of characters while you keep drawing from the main pile.
Twenty matched seven-dice sets in mixed colours, with a bag to keep them in. For this genre the useful part is quantity rather than variety: twenty six-sided dice and twenty twenty-sided dice between them cover everything these games roll. Acrylic dice of this kind are light, which suits balancing them into a stack and keeps them quieter on a table late at night.
A tower of hardwood blocks that you pull from and rebuild on top until it falls. In solo story games the tower replaces a hit-point track: every risk costs a pull, and the collapse ends the story instead of a number reaching zero. When the tower is the mechanic rather than a party game, consistent block size is what keeps the risk honest.
No, and several of these games say so explicitly on their own pages. There are no rules to memorise beyond a card draw and a prompt, no group to coordinate and no character sheet full of numbers. Comment threads under every game in this genre are full of people reporting that it was their first roleplaying game of any kind.
Between fifteen minutes and two hours, depending on the game. The shortest of these is designed for sittings of fifteen to thirty minutes, the structured ones state sixty to ninety minutes, and the longest run for months across many sessions. You can stop mid-chapter in all of them, because the journal holds your place.
One at a time is the better pattern. A single book here can carry anything from one evening to years of play, and the long ones only pay off once your village or your river has enough history in it to feel like a place. Finish a book, or get close, before buying the next one.
Sometimes, and it is worth checking before you plan a gift. Most are sold as PDFs by independent designers who print in small runs, so physical editions appear and sell out on a scale of years. Several ship printer-friendly files and separate sheets precisely because players are expected to print their own.
Whatever answers the prompt, at whatever length you like. Most of these games ask a direct question — who visited today, what did you find, what did the letter say — and a few sentences is a complete answer. Players who have done this for years describe their entries as notes and fragments rather than finished writing.
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