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!

Hardcase is a 28 page solo TTRPG by Thursday Garreau and art by Ida Ailes. In it, you struggle to get by on Basement Station, in a slice-of-life game in a rusty cyberpunk future.

The first thing that strikes me about Hardcase, is that unlike most solo games I see, it’s not modelled after an existing solo game. In this case, it’s modelled after a mixed-success system like Apocalypse World and you get some additional labels which give you bonuses. The main flavour subsystem here is stress; you can upgrade the result of a roll by taking stress (you choose the type of stress from a list), and it gives you a permanent debuff; but if you pay enough, or take enough drugs, you can untick the box. But stress doesn’t kill you, conditions do: if you take 3 conditions of any nature (related to stress or not) you die. The driver of gameplay is economics; you have to pay for rent, and food, and treatment if you get conditions. If you don’t earn enough money, you can take on debt, but when the bill comes due every 2 weeks, you might gain stress if you can’t pay, or maybe get a job that you have to do, else you’ll face more severe consequences. But gear and cybernetics, as well as subcontractors to help you out, all cost money. If you manage to earn enough money to put some away, you might retire; but there’s a decent chance when you try to retire, someone might try to steal your savings. This is a pretty pleasing loop, in terms of creating a direction in which to play. Enemies are basically the same as the Player Character, but may only act on a “miss” roll, and may have fewer than 3 conditions before they’re killed.

We then have the setting: You work and live on Basement Station, a half-finished logistics hub hanging in orbit above the earth, at the zenith of a space elevator. This is sketched out in broad strokes: 6 locales, 6 characters, how to gamble, what’s in a vending machine, a dozen drugs, and psychic folk. And jobs: There are examples of work: How to run deliveries, random “distractions” that might occur along the way, how to run salvage operations, random “hazards” that might stop you from raiding abandoned ships, how to hunt bounties. There are examples of how to use the now text-based internet, and how to play the VR that many of the residents of Basement Station spend their spare time in. There’s a page on what’s going on out in space, and a few people who aren’t from Basement station, who you might meet. All of this adds up to a pretty compelling little world, with just enough concrete facts to spark your imagination. Half the book is packed with tables, descriptions, and lists to help you understand the ins and outs of Basement Station. It’s really good work.

At this point, though, I’m most of the way through the game, and I don’t know how to play it solo. It feels like a nice little sci-fi game, but there’s nothing about it that screams solo. The game ends, with a page on how the author plays Hardcase. I kind of love that how to play the game is kind of an afterthought, here. It assumes you’re a smart cookie, choosing to read this game. The advice the author gives is pretty straightforward: 1. When you miss, the world reacts in a way that needs to be handled. 2. If you’re not sure what happens next, assume that it’s the worst possible thing. 3. The first thing on your character’s mind is usually “How do I get paid today?”. It’s a solid phrasing of common refereeing advice, and it’s also a case that every game can be a solo game if you want it to be.

I come out of reading Hardcase with mixed feelings: Do I want to play referee and player in a solo game about a future corpo-fascist cyberpunk reality? I’m not sure that I do. My current reality is close enough to that, as I mentioned in my earlier review of Hypermall Unlimited Violence. But this is a pretty compelling little space station, if you do. It’s vibrant, interesting. It gives you just enough to springboard off, I suspect, for Basement Station to be interesting a background for your character’s rags-to-riches story. Your campaign of Hardcase might turn into a show about the many people who struggle to break out of poverty here, or might follow one character on their whole complex journey. It gets me excited. But, it is a solo game after the style of games like Ironsworn, where you’re playing 2 roles, that of player and that of referee, rather than it being one role. That’s a different kind of barrier for me, personally to overcome.

It’s worth noting, though, that there’s an introductory tutorial for Hardcase, specifically for people struggling with how to start out, like me, with additional guardrails and supports, called Escape the A, and that there is a, expansion called Truthseeker that adds additional support for the world, and that people have released adventures for Hardcase that can support your play as well. Maybe my concerns are short-sighted, given all that additional support. I nevertheless think Hardcase would slap as a 2-player game. That would be my preferred format for playing Hardcase, I think. But does Hardcase work as a solo game for a bunch of people who are more interested in playing something with a more traditional TTRPG structure? Hell yes, this is absolutely solid, drives further story hard, and is set in a really compelling world.

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