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!

Cryptid Keeper is a referee-less, trifold pamphlet roleplaying game where in you play zookeepers in a zoo for mystical creatures, by Joie Yong.

Your keeper has 3 stats (charisma, lore and body), as well as a favourite cryptid. You roll against a random challenge rating, for any challenges you face facing cryptids, patrons or other NPCs. There is also a simple procedure to generate a zoo, filling it with between 8 and 20 cryptids, and identifying the biome filling the habitat. The zoo is obviously magical, to allow for this.

The bulk of play itself is a generated by the event table, which contains 20 randomised events, of which you’ll experience 1-2 per day, depending on how many players you’re playing with. These randomised events or vague, but in a way that invites story-telling – for example, “A cryptid in Habitat 6 has found its way into Habitat 3” isn’t that interesting on the face of it, but with the relationships you’ve developed with the cryptids, your zoo design, and the randomness of the generation, you’ll liked get a unique situation out of it. Most of the prompts work really well like this – simple, but effective.

That’s the whole game, which is interesting. Most of the play here is implied, which is something I generally dislike. For example, it’s implied that the moment-to-moment gameplay will include cleaning and maintaining habitats, feeding, bathing and entertaining cryptids, and meeting with the vet and also wealthy donors, punctuated by the events. It’s clearly supposed to be a “week in the life” kind of game, played for a maximum of a few days. It’s clearly implied that you’re supposed to collaboratively draw a little map of your zoo and potentially also your cryptid guests, which just sounds like a pleasure to do to me. It probably helps that I recently read a book about a cryptid zoo, The Phoenix Keeper by SA Maclean, which gives me a very clear picture of what I’d want this to be.

This really makes me wonder about the role of genre or text familiarity as a form of scaffolding in games that we don’t talk about enough. Cryptid Keeper slaps, because it’s a very very specific homage to a niche genre. Could this be a very detailed genre-emulation storygame? Yeah, sure. Would that make it better? I don’t think it would be better for me, someone who reads this and thinks “Oooh I can play Phoenix Keeper”. I don’t think someone who has no magical zookeeper tropes in their head would benefit from those extra rules that would ensure a rigid adherence to the story beats, either. This is kind of the sweet spot for me. But I’ve played and read plenty of tiny games where it didn’t hit the sweet spot for me, perhaps because I didn’t have that familiarity. How much of the love, for example, for Brindlewood Bay, is borne from how many generations grew up on reruns of Murder She Wrote and Ms Marple, rather than the surplus of loving moves structured especially to replicate the story beats therein?

The other thing I enjoy and love about Cryptid Keeper, is that I while it’s clearly a game that would be a joyful night of play with a few friends, it is also designed explicitly to also be playable solo. And I think it would be a pleasure to play solo. I have trouble doing things for me, at times, so I’d feel the urge to record it as an audio journal, or journal it, which I wouldn’t feel the need to in a group, but for those who enjoy solo games, it’s honestly a great one, and, unlike most solo games I’ve come across, it doesn’t copy one of only a few systems designed for solo play.

I can’t imagine there’s a surplus of gamers out there looking for a cryptid zoo keeping game, but if that sounds like something adorable to you, either alone or with your friends, Cryptid Keeper is a no-brainer to me. It’s cute, it’s short, and would be a pleasure to play, and there aren’t many tiny games I feel like wouldn’t benefit from expansion.

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