Solo tabletop role-playing games might seem intimidating to some, but Koriko: A Magical Year from Mousehole Press makes it easy and fun to dive into its bewitching world — as long as you can slow down enough to make it through the opening chapters. Blending elegant mechanics with a gentle story focus, Koriko confidently guides new players and experienced solo role-players alike in writing their own witchy tale.
An excellent introduction
Koriko fits very naturally into the genre of cozy solo TTRPGs, telling the story of a teenage witch leaving home for the first time to live in the exciting city of Koriko. It takes its name from the city in Kiki’s Delivery Service, inspired heavily by both the Studio Ghibli animated film and the original book by Eiko Kadono. Koriko is steeped in cozy culture, from its sepia-edged pages to its gentle tale of a young witch making their way in the world, and would make an excellent game for parents or teachers to play with kids.
Like many solo TTRPGs, Koriko is focused around the process of journaling the player character’s experiences, but it also takes the time to eases player into solo creativity. First, it teaches you how to set up your journal step-by-step as you introduce your character, with paragraphs to copy out and customize. Koriko guides the player as they grow in confidence and slowly learn to structure their own journal entries, letters and stories. The opening is reminiscent of Princess With a Cursed Sword by anna anthropy, another great introduction to solo journaling RPGs.
Magical mechanics
Gameplay is divided into ‘volumes’ structured around the seasons of the year, with each year providing different opportunities, prompts and dilemmas. At the end of each volume, the player writes a letter home to their witchy mentor.
At its heart, the gameplay loop is simple. Each season, you follow the instructions in the book to form a deck of tarot cards that you shuffle and draw in a random order. Each card you draw represents an experience your character has while in Koriko: either a moment, represented by a card from the minor arcana, or a confidante prompt indicated by a card from the major arcana. If you aren’t very familiar with tarot cards, there’s a handy explanation early on, and you can use the electronic version of the tarot deck if you don’t have access to a physical one. You do not initially include certain cards like the Tower and Death, only adding them when certain circumstances bring them into your character’s life.
The cards all have a linked prompt in the tables at the back of the book and in addition, each volume has a table of additional prompts called ‘twists’, some of which are labelled as risky. If you choose a risky twist, you add more dice to your ongoing stack of dice. When that dice stack falls, you check the most frequent number showing among the fallen dice against a table of consequences. I was nervous the first time my dice tower fell, as I’d become quite invested in my little witch, but the consequences table is pleasingly nuanced. The consequences always provoke some sort of change going forward: you might add a lesson to your journal, which means you might need to stack fewer dice in the future, or add one of the special confidantes into your circle so you have the chance to interact with them.
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The circle is also an inspired idea: as you draw major arcana cards, you encounter confidantes around the city with their own dilemmas and problems, and you slowly build a ‘circle’ of characters as a separate deck. The confidante has a set of prompts to use on each occasion you draw them, with a final crossroads story after you have met them four times, in which you choose whether to help them (which carries a degree of risk) or refuse them.
The mechanics are introduced slowly but even so, a fairly significant chunk of the book is dedicated to explaining them. I found it easiest to briefly look through this and get an overview of the sections so I could refer back to them later rather than trying to understand it all at once. A cheat sheet that had the main mechanics and the very helpful flow diagram might be a useful download to support gameplay. Given the number of resources the digital edition provides (including access to an online tarot deck, an alternative starting experience, and a guide to playing Koriko with other people), it’s clear that Mousehole Press has already put a great deal of thought into removing obstacles to play, and this would be a nice addition.
You end up playing a sort of narrative bingo by drawing your card and then choosing which twist to use and every decision you make inspires some sort of narrative change, which flows surprisingly well after the first few draws. The act of drawing cards and checking against the book entries (helped enormously by the two ribbon bookmarks in the printed book), crossing out boxes on your twist table and stacking dice adds a level of physicality to an experience that can otherwise feel a bit ephemeral.
The downside to this is that Koriko has more setup and upkeep requirements than many solo games, with a perilous stack of dice and carefully-assembled card decks that need to be maintained throughout. The book contains guidance on ways you can put these away without losing your place or use an alternative to dice stacking, but for many people, the effort of setup each time when they might only have time to write one entry could make this less appealing than more self-contained games.
Pacing challenges
Fair warning: Koriko’s pacing may not suit everyone. Solo RPGs by their nature require slowing down, writing things out, and creating a space in which to immerse yourself in a story. Initially, the pacing is perhaps a little too slow. I found myself eager to reach Koriko and start to engage with the more complex game mechanics, but each page I turned was another set of prompts about my journey to and arrival in the city, often with characters and locations I might never be able to interact with again. This is almost certainly going to vary by player, and the intention is clearly for a meditative experience, but for the impatient, the initial immersion into the world can feel achingly slow.
Perhaps if you could use these initial pages to set up a couple of your later Circle of NPCs, the opening section might feel a little less weighed down, but Koriko’s mechanics are so delicately set up that any change would probably throw a lot of other elements out. You may just have to bear with those opening pages, but Koriko is also very permissive about changing or even ignoring prompts that don’t fit well, so it isn’t much of a stretch to say that you could do one of each departure and travel day rather than two. It is well worth sticking with it, as once you reach the city, things begin to get more exciting.
If you have even a passing interest in cozy solo RPGs with engaging mechanics and creative prompts, Koriko is a great choice. As long as you are able to make time and space for it in your life, it provides a rewarding narrative of community, connection and self-discovery. Pick up Koriko: A Magical Year from Mousehole Press to begin your adventure.
This piece is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by the reviewer.
Published: Jul 22, 2024 03:19 pm