Zinequest #4 Solo Games for you to Check Out

Zinequest #4 is here!

What is a zine and what is Zinequest? Well, a Zine is a small RPG booklet and a tried and true format for making fun and quick RPGs, supplements, maps, or settings. Zinequest is a celebration of Zines put on by Kickstarter annually(ish). It's a great way to support smaller RPG designers as they produce easy-to-read and digest games. They are fun, creative, and great to play.

Check out the full slate of Zinequest games on Kickstarter!

There are hundreds of Zinequest projects on offer, and many are solo games! I’m excited about several of them and I wish I could check out all of the solo games on offer but I just don’t have the time to do so. So with Zinequest ending in a couple of weeks, I’m pointing out some solo Zines I’m excited about personally.

As a note, I’m not associated with any of these creators. I just thought these all looked great! Some of these campaigns are finishing in about a week, so if you like them support them today.

Love reading about these Zines! So creative and interesting. Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

NOTORIOUS, a solo RPG zine

A game of hardscrabble bounty hunting amid intergalactic war.

This game is exciting. It strikes me as similar to the Mandalorian and Star Wars bounty hunter-type adventures. The art looks great and the themes of alien undergrounds, lone gunfighters, and dramatic flashbacks really speak to me as a player.

The game also has two different ways to play. An arcade mode where you can finish a game in a couple of hours or a story mode where you can create a more epic story in a slower manner. I like this setup as it will allow me to play a quick session and if I really enjoy it I can hunker down for a long campaign.

Six different character profiles and six different planets mean there is plenty of space to get stuck into this game!

A Torch in the Dark

A single-player dungeon delving role-playing game.

This game I’ve actually played! Or at least I played the previous version prior to this Kickstarter being launched. I really enjoyed it. It's a fun hack of Forged in the Dark and the setting is awesome. In the game setting, there was a violent and destructive revolution against the evil rich. While they were defeated and dead, their spirits still haunt the underground. Your character is then tasked with diving into the tombs of the rich, defeating their spirits, and getting rich at the same time.

It is a fun quick game to get into and an enjoyable experience. If you're looking for a dungeon dive that is a bit different from the normal DnD-style hack and slash, give this game a try.

I’ll also be talking about it further in an upcoming post about solo Dungeon dives, so stay tuned.

Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop: A solo TTRPG

Upon a river, you run a floating bookshop. Travel up and downstream, stopping at different towns and meeting customers.

After you’ve hunted down some criminals and delved into the depths of dungeons and you are ready to relax a bit, try out Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop. This game reminds me of Wanderhome in its desire to create a relaxing and wholesome experience.

In this game you are an owner of a floating bookshop traveling up and down a river, selling books to your animal friends, and meeting characters as you go. The river even changes as the seasons do.

Gameplay revolves around flipping cards to determine who your animal customers are, you roll dice for weather and how many customers you get, and on your days off you can decide to pull up anchor or explore the surrounding area.

THE TAMING OF THE SLUGIRAFFE – #ZineQuest

A solo pit-crawl quest to capture an ancient beast.

Mix pokemon with Dark Souls and what do you get? The Taming of the Slugiraffe. You, a background and unimportant fantasy creature, will be undertaking an epic point crawl deep into THE PIT to retrieve a beast that will bring your community a new golden age.

The game uses a simple exploration system with deadly combat to create a fun and unique system. The player will draw the path through the pit so you can even dust off your artistic skills for this zine.

AND ONE - A Solo Basketball Court RPG [Zine Quest 4]

Played on a real court, designed for solo play. Inspired by every backyard game you made up as a kid.

Now this one is a little different, a sports-based solo RPG meant to be played on an actual basketball court. I admit that the whole concept sounded interesting right off the bat. There are even two sets of rules, Basketball, where rules are meant to be back and forth and organised, and streetball, where things are faster-paced. At least in this game, you don’t have to work about getting elbowed in the face.

One Breath Left

Explore procedurally generated spaceships in this solo-journaling sci-fi survival horror game.

And last but not least, One Breath Left is a solo-journaling set in space, where you are tasked with figuring out exactly what happened to your ship. And your ship’s name? Wreck, so you know things aren’t going to go well from the start.

What really stands out in this game is the art direction. It says it is inspired by technical manuals from the 20th century and it looks like it! It is an interesting art direction, but it works great in the setting that they chose.

The game plays by creating an explorer and then pulling cards from a custom deck that says what event the explorer has to deal with next. In the end, you see if your explorer survived, ran out of breath, got sucked out into space, or had any number of horrible deaths.

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That's it for this blog. There are more solo games in Zinequest #4, so take a look and let me know if I missed anything unique or special. Be sure to search ‘solo’ in the Zinequest search function for a variety of games. And if you play traditional games, wow, there are a ton for you to pick from also.

Have an excellent time kickstarting some Zines and see you all next time! Keep rolling those dice.

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- Croaker