This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Tea and Toadstools is a 9 page solo journalling game based on the Carta system, by the monomynous Anya. In it, you play a hedgehog in a twill vest who just wants to be left alone, even though the rest of the forest has other ideas. Well, in my case it was a blue dress and apron, because Mrs Rabbit.

To play Tea and Toadstools, you wander around a board you make out of playing cards, flipping the cards. Whenever you flip a card, you look at the prompt list, and are encouraged to journal if you wish, what happens to hedgehog; each card also has you gain or lose a resource. If you reach your goal card before you run out of resources, you have a good day. If you run out of resources before you get to the goal card, you have a bad day, but you can try again tomorrow. If you’re anything like me, you’re like: “Oh, this is cool. Great”. Luckily, I’m on a day off today, so I get to pull out my playing cards (sadly not the Haakum Playful Animals deck, which I’d kill for) and give it a go. What did I find?

I’ve written about a bunch of prompt-based games this month, so I won’t harp on about the fact that I want more specificity in my prompts. This game ain’t bad on that criteria, but it’s not excellent by any stretch. I’d love the other animals in the forest to be characterised a little more: What’s Dr Raccoon like? To me, perhaps as a result of not being North American, most of these forest animals have pretty similar stereotypical characterisations, so I have trouble embodying them for the purposes of this game, especially when I need sink my teeth into the events. I’d also really love for gaining or losing resources to be a choice in each prompt: That would put a lot more meat on these bones. Rather than simply losing 2 resources when the crows steal your laundry, make it a choice: Expend 2 resources to get your laundry back, or lose no resources to sacrifice your laundry, and it’ll come back to haunt you later. I feel like adding a second currency than resources, and having the outcome be in the balance of those resources might make the ending more satisfying: Rather than simply not being happy that day, you always find your goal eventually: But at what cost, Mrs Hedgehog, at what cost to your beautiful home?

This concept of constructing a random board, of never knowing which parts of the deck will show up until they do, is a really clever system full of replayability, and I can see why the author adapted it, but despite it saying that you could choose to play this as a board game, the most significant flaw is that all of the cards are flipped, meaning that while it feels like you’re travelling around hedgehog’s forest, you, the resident of the forest, have no idea what that forest is until you stumble upon it. I feel like it would benefit from some predictability; perhaps that’s a literal map of the forest that the cards are played over, as a second layer of prompts; perhaps that the cards are themed differently — currently the themes are “The Path”, “Botheration”, “Helping Paw”, and “Community”, which I don’t find very helpful at all. I wrote in my review of Foul Play earlier in the month, that a lot of these smaller, card-based games would benefit greatly from having a deck of cards associated with them, simply because it would bring so much more to the table. In this case, simply building your board out of a maze on the back of the cards, like the board game Labyrinth, would add so much to the feeling of exploration. Similarly, somehow being provided some foresight into the spaces around you on the backs of the cards — like them being themed to reflect parts of the forest by suit, but each suit meaning something in terms of likelihood of gaining or losing resource — would add a lot.

This game has an absurdly cute cover by Ghostcandle, as you can see above, and the interiors are equally cute, filled with forest animals and swirling decorations. These illustrations bring the atmosphere necessary to such a game, although I do feel like a more spacious layout would make it feel less like studying and more like playing. I often struggle with journalling games because they feel like this, and so it’s better for me personally, when they lean away from the wall of text layouts. That said, it’s clear and easy to navigate through, it has useful diagrams for play, and nobody is going to struggle to figure out what’s going on.

I think for me, Tea and Toadstools is in tension between “I love this theme, and it just sings it both in terms of prompts, choice of system, and art and layout” and “But, if we’d made the prompts more specific, changed the resource mechanism, and added backs to the cards, it would be the best solo game I’ve ever played”. I strongly encourage people who like Peter Rabbit, slightly grumpy coziness and enjoy journalling games, because those specific changes I want aren’t things that are even slightly common in the solo game sphere that I have seen. But wow, does Tea and Toadstools come close to being a solo journalling game I’d actually recommend to someone new to roleplaying games, which has never, ever happened before. It’s so close. I can see the game I want right there on the horizon.

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