These solo tabletop RPGs will break your heart and put it back together again
Over the past decade, video games have offered deeply emotional single-player experiences, but the recent wave of solo role-playing games has shown that pen and paper RPGs can be just as heartbreaking, if not more so.
Traditionally, tabletop role-playing games allow players to gather around the table to joke around and slay monsters. While older hack and slash tabletop games could occasionally provide profound emotional moments (with a real resurgence in narrative gaming in the ’90s), the latest crop of tabletop designers has taken the solitary, almost meditative experience of playing a TTRPG for one player perfected.
Below are a few games that will have you cracking open like an egg so you can put the pieces back together.
Just one of many solo games from this award-winning game/graphic designer, architect, and musician, Midnight Melodies taps into his musical experience as players embody a jazz pianist who discovers the Grim Reaper cannot touch them. Instead of haunting you forever, Death takes you under his wing in the Wrongful Deaths Unit. Every evening, after your performance in the jazz bar, you unravel a mystery about someone’s untimely death: you sing a song to report your findings to the Grim Reaper.
Other solo games from Capacle include the ghost hunt Wraithhoundthe winner of the CRiT Award 2023 Not a demonAnd rebel, a solo or group game where players are tasked with overthrowing a tyrannical government.
Galatea – named after the Greek myth of a statue coming to life – is about a work of art created by a brilliant and celebrated, yet terribly lonely and tormented artist. You were His perfect creation that came to life and now you must remain perfect at all costs. This game about codependency and helplessness shows how devastating it is to not live up to the expectations that others have placed on you. Based on the Miserable and alone system, this solo RPG uses the growing instability of a wooden block tower to build tension as it progresses. Galatea is perhaps the most literal interpretation of this article’s theme, with a cover that references the Japanese practice of Kitsugi, which uses gold to repair cracks in a piece of pottery.
S. Kaiya’s other solo performance work includes the Untitled Mottenspela card game about making promises you can’t keep, and you, beyond the palea daily ritual game in which players take on the role of a unique monster that observes the mortals around them.
International award-winning designer momatoes creates games that feel like works of art before they even have a chance to hit your heart. As a graphic designer by trade, momatoes’ unique perspective shines through in both their aesthetic and mechanical choices. You can pick up for a free introduction to their work Goodbye, good nighta game that uses dice to explore the inevitable cruelty of amnesia through the lens of electroshock therapy in a mid-century psychiatric hospital.
The second edition of offers a more mechanical experience The Magician lets you act as a sorcerer in search of arcane supremacy. Unlike other journaling games, The Magician is crunchy in its mechanics, letting players roll dice as they lose control, gain power, and collect scars while risking everything. Yet other people are at the heart of this solo game, bonds that connect you to your humanity on your doomed journey to omnipotence. The first edition is for sale, while the second edition is currently available for pre-orders.