Solo Games

In which I wax rhapsodic about a game I haven't finished yet.

I sepnt a good chunk of the weekend just gone playing a solo game, Village Witch. I have some doubts as to whether one can really describe solo games as games, per se, but the only other term is “writing exercise”, and that seems a bit dry and slightly secondary-school-English-grim compared to the enjoyment of the actual thing. I’m nowhere near done yet - and I don’t feel compelled to finish it if I don’t find time - but I still want to write about it.

“Village Witch is a solo journaling game about a witch finding a home,” according to its writer. It’s a pretty simple game, even within the context of solo games, which tend toward that way. You start by describing your witch character, answering a few questions, and the village at which they’ve arrived. You can determine the kind of biome it’s in randomly, or you can pick one. You also determine if you’re writing in a fantasy, historical, or modern setting (or you could do other stuff; sf or horror or magical realism). And you decide what kind of powers they have.

And then, with draws from a deck of tarot or playing cards, you get simple prompts of day-to-day events in your village. “You find an item someone lost. What is it? Do you return it to them?” or “You’re preparing food and someone stops by. You invite them to stay and eat. Who is it and what do you eat?”. Some of them hint at gently witch-y things, with mentions of tea, crystals, soup, blends of herbs, and so on. Play occurs in seasons, and lasts for one year; you decide for yourself when a given season is over, and you can continue through the deck or reshuffle at the end of a season.

The prompts set some constraints on the setting. It’s a village, for a start, not wilderness or a city. There are plenty of people in the village, and you deal with animals and plants, crystals and rituals. Apart from that, you’re free to invent detail as you go. I did no advance planning at all, just dived in.

What appeared was a world of about 18th century tech, but with background magic. There are various kinds of witches - grave witches, fox witches, light witches, and witches of the Great Coven, who are presumably referred to as coven witches by others, although that hasn’t come up yet. There are spirits (which everyone can see, and some of which act as normal mortals) and ghosts (which only witches can see), and some sort of personal haunting called an attendance, which nearly everyone has in some form, and from which a witch can glean some information. There’s a spirit gate near the village, which allows conversations - inasmuch as conversations are possible - with ghosts. There’s a wider world, but apart from sending out for seeds, and writing a few letters, my witch hasn’t considered it much; most of his thinking is about the village, its spirits, the place in the mountains where he was trained, and his predecessor in this specific place. There is a characteristic of some people called wood blood; it’s not clear to me yet whether this is elven ancestry or something like influence the planes have on tieflings in Planescape. And he has to return to the witch house in the village every night for a year, or move on to somewhere different (moving on to somewhere different is explicitly covered in the rules).

Characters are appearing as the cards call for them, and sometimes it’s convenient for the person invoked by a card to be a character that has already appeared. So far I’ve an innkeeper, a grave witch in the next village, a chimney-sweep/ditch-digger/drain-clearer/well-digger/dowser/gravedigger, a widow, her lover and her dog, a farmer and a scribe who are both village elders, an absentee lord, a wood-blooded hunter, his slow-aging daughter and Great Spirit wife, a dim-witted cobbler, a few ghosts, a smarter than average fox, and various cousins, children and siblings of those.

If I had to point to fictional influences for this, then Pratchett’s witches are obviously top of the list. There’s also some of Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, and a bit of Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart series. Maybe a little bit of M. L. Rio, because I read If We Were Villains recently.

I’ve played a few solo games like this before, albeit mostly with a little more structure to them. They’re easier for me to write than pure prose narrative of my own, because it’s a little like running a game; you can direct the plot in a vague way, and provide details, but there are decisions you’re not making, and those shape the narrative much more. I do prefer to hand-write them, for some reason, although I hand-write game notes for games I’m running, too. I feel there’s a different kind of voice from hand-writing.

Weirdly, despite a ferocious level of world-building, I don’t feel compelled to do more with this setting. It can just be its own thing. There’s a pleasing kind of peace in that.

Other games in this line that I’ve played, or that I own, include Colostle, Green Skies, Skyworthy, Whispers in the Walls, The Empress and her Seer, and Accomplice (and I see that many of those descend from Alone Amongst The Stars, which I don’t yet own, but probably should). There are also Grasping Nettles, Alone On A Map, Ex Novo and Delve, which are more mapping and setting-generation games than journalling.

You might hear more about Village Witch, or it might just fade into the background. The point, I feel, is the considerable enjoyment I got out of playing it, and I feel that if you have some free time over whatever holidays you’re taking as the year turns, it or something like it are an excellent pursuit.