Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

The Bonsai Diary is a 34 page journalling game by Gene Koo. In it you nurture and grow a Bonsai Tree, with pen and ink.

The mechanic is simple: You tract the previous page’s bonsai, and then add a line to make your tree grow. Each page, you’ll get a prompt, which will guide you to tell the story of yourself and your tree. Sometimes these prompts are a question, sometimes there are images to help direct what you draw, and sometimes they’re quotes. Sometimes they’re very specific, sometimes they’re ephemeral. I get the impression this is supposed to be a regular practice — you play a page every day for a month — but it doesn’t outright say that.

The layout is spacious — as it should be, as you’re supposed to be drawing all over the page — and conservative, but as it is played page by page as you progress, information design is straightforward here. It’s elegant, and lovely. You can buy a print edition; I had the print and play edition, which has clear instructions on how to reproduce it. I have a strong feeling that this game would benefit from being on higher quality, better bound paper. Like, it screams “I want to be on a textured, spiral-bound notebook”; that said, you could do that, if you wanted. There are instructions for creating your own diary, unique from this one, using a deck of playing cards, in the back. This would be, in my opinion, a project well worth the time.

Bonsai Diary is another game in this past year or two’s trend toward book play; Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, Triangle Agency, and most recently Spine, all have repositioned the book itself as the center (or at least a fulcrum among others) that the game spins around. This isn’t a new concept, but I think that designers are embracing it in newer and more interesting ways. It also plays with the oft-lauded destruction of a text — but in the opposite direction. You’re tracing your Bonsai from the previous page, so every page you have the opportunity to deface your page and your Bonsai, and you simply do not have to. There are pages that take advantage of the ephemerality of the tracing of your Bonsai, which is fascinating for the very same reason why other legacy games are fascinating in how they ask you to destroy things you previously wouldn’t have dreamed of replacing. It’s inventive and I love it.

Bonsai Diary is full-bent focused on providing a contemplative, mindful experience, but in a creative, surprising way. It’s really quite excellent. It’s also quite interesting. So many solo journalling games are instead full-bent on horror, or fear, or exploring your innermost feelings, and I enjoy this calmer, more measured pace. If you’re looking for some kind of meditative gaming practice, for a month, or for a day, I’d check out the Bonsai Diary.

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