Colostle is a solo TTRPG where you explore a vast castle, with oceans, lands, and cities within its walls. You draw cards each turn in two phases, Exploration and (optionally) Combat to see what your character encounters and resolve the challenges. You’ve got a quest you’re working towards which has inspired your journey, but you’ll also get distracted by the other inhabitants of the castle – both humans and Rooks, huge stone guardians you may need to fight.

I’ve started playing and reviewing solo games, with a particular eye to using them as sources of inspiration for group play; or at least to focus on the act of play itself. Patrons can also see my (rough and ready) play notes of the game. I played Colostle for a couple of hours, and took only brief notes as I played – but did a lot of thinking about it as I did.

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The Crunch

Colostle relies a lot on player interpretation and reading, and parsing into a journal – I can’t see how you’d play without writing up in prose your actions (as opposed to, say, Ironsworn – where the moves and tracks provide a clearer picture of the action). Each round in the Exploration phase you draw some cards to determine what happens – sometimes sending you to other sub-tables – and then sometimes have a Combat phase where you fight (using card flips) the people you encounter.

The exploration phase card flips are – loose – and I think that’s by design. How many cards you flip is based on your character’s Exploration score, and you’ve got to weave the results into some sort of narrative – this is easier with a lower score! So, for example, the 2 of spades gives you an intact door – from the table

“…it’s impossible, huge beyond imagining, disappearing upwards into the sky… If it’s RUINED maybe you can slip through a gap, but if it’s INTACT you might have to find a mechanism to unlock or open it.”

The “maybe you can slip through a gap” isn’t unpinned by rules – it’s up to you as a player, and maybe informed by the other cards you drew; likewise, finding a mechanism is left open to your own narrative whims. There’s a MACHINE PART entry on the ITEMS table, but you probably don’t want to just leave it to chance – and there’s no way to actively search for anything either.

If this sounds like I’m being negative about it, I’m not – I’m sure it’s a deliberate approach, and it offers a different sort of narrative constraint to other solo / journaling games with this. By removing almost all resolution outside of combat, you’re left with big open spaces to work out what happens. Or, to put it this way – what you encounter, and if you win a fight, are determined by the rules, but everything else is left up to your own fiat. I think this is unusual, even in journaling games, and it produces an interesting experience in play – as you naturally try to piece the game together into a coherent narrative, sometimes without much help from the system. This sometimes gets dreamlike, surreal, as you have to double-back, or lose track of important goals – but it fits the setting.

Combat is straightforward and results in matching card flips from your opponents – who are all determined narratively. There’s something made of how you never HAVE to fight – you can always sneak past a rook – and combat does feel sufficiently dangerous to make you think twice about this. In contrast to the freewheeling narrative of the Exploration phase, the Combat phase feels quite mechanical – but it does mean you can actually work out who won more easily.

The Fluff

The enormous castle of Colostle is powerfully communicated throughout the text – really strong, consistent art throughout also helps. The setting supports the gameplay cycle above, really – you’re wandering through vast rooms encountering unknowable NPCs and rooks, and the calling that set you off might not be what you come back to.

There’s a clear consistent vision here, as you’d expect from a game that the author and artist has done mostly solo – Nich Angel really knows what he wants here, and communicates that clearly. There’s a selection of supplements too, that expand out the world and offer more tables – which is good, because although the base tables are flavourful, they aren’t very extensive.

Solo Play as Inspiration

Has playing Colostle inspired me to put in scenes in my group games? I think it might have done. An early encounter when my explorer met two merchant/thieves who turned out to be powerful opponents (and who then escaped) made me think of that as a good opening for a fantasy “recover the thing” one-shot; start with a combat against powerful enemies who escape after a round or two, meaning the players need to track them down AND find a way to beat them.

The imagery of fighting a massive stone rook the size of a small house is something I’ll use as well – clumsy, easy to avoid, but a dangerous opponent. I can’t say this game has given me a ready-to-pull episode plot the way some solo RPGs do, but it’s a different kind of game. The exploration made it more thoughtful and the random tables I’m sure could be used for inspiration if I kept at them.

More generally, I wonder about the Exploration Phase – Combat Phase as it applies in group RPGs; is this something we could lean into more deliberately, as it’s often how games work anyway. Is the Exploration Phase the same as the Connective Tissue in between Fights in a Three Fights structure? Well, yes and no – because it might affect what the fight actually is. And if the Exploration phase had some actual rules behind it, it might let you avoid the Combat Phase entirely.