Zine Month 2025: Solo RPGs

Most of my tabletop game mileage is spent alone. That’s partly due to the nature of my job, in which too few hours are spread across a dizzying number of titles, but it’s also how I prefer to play. There’s something meditative about sitting at my desk (or wherever I can play) and setting out pens, notebooks, cards, and dice — a nerdier version of mise en place. Hot drink and music complete the ritual and allow me to intentionally engage with solitary entertainment. My brain eats that shit up.

Zine Quest, and more recently Zine Month, have become bumper crop seasons for solo RPGs. The short length and tight turnaround favors smaller projects, which often deliver beautifully distilled experiences that might fill a handful of evening sessions instead of a campaign spanning months. I yearn for this time of year. If you listen closely, you might hear me strapping on a bib and scraping my knife and fork together like a cartoon wolf.

The Rascal team are taking advantage of the season to don our crowdfunding galoshes and wade in search of projects that catch our interest. It’s fun to talk about cool games, but the nature of the industry makes the exercise a bit fraught — these are projects and ideas, not yet games you can hold in your hand. And the below selection reflects my own taste, even though I’ve tried to vary the flavor and lean towards campaigns with quickstarts, demos, or some kind of meat on the bone.