Review in Summary
Published by Nich Angell after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Colostle is a solo RPG that went on to take the Gold Ennie for Best Rules in 2022. The game sets the player on a one-person adventure in a fantastic world known as the “Roomlands”, which is made up of the colossal interior of a castle known as “The Colostle”.
Using the book and a standard deck of playing cards, players move through the game generating a story using a combination of prompts from the game and their own imagination. The mechanics are somewhat abstract, so there’s none of the crunchy combat from games like DnD or Pathfinder, and the game is built from the ground up to be played solo, so it’s not as complex as something like One Ring’s Strider Mode Rules which adapt a complex TTRPG for solo play.
The art of the game is cartoony and beautiful, but the world of Colostle is dangerous. Players journey with little but the clothing on their backs through a world full of dangerous people and beasts, as well as gigantic castle-like monsters known as “Rooks.” If you can survive the dangers of a world where doors are tall enough to reach the clouds and where a continent might run the length of a hallway, you might be fortunate enough to ascend the Colostle’s stairs to unlock its greatest secrets.
At a compact page count of roughly 60 pages (much of which is art and reference tables) and a price point of just £8 (the author is based in the UK) for a digital copy, Colostle is easy to get into and quick to learn. It’s great for a quick play session or two on a quiet night, and if you don’t mind reading the PDF on your phone and using an app to simulate drawing cards, you can easily take Colostle wherever you go.
Nich Angel, author of Colostle, provided a physical review copy and art assets for this review.
Castles All the Way Down (Or Up)
In Colostle, nearly everything is a castle or a section of a castle. Homes are built from parts of castles. Armor has battlements. Helmets might look like small towers. It’s castles running around inside a bigger castle. You, as the player, must equip yourself with suitable castle-themed armaments to explore and defend yourself in the world.
Exploration is handled by drawing cards, with each card representing one thing that you’ll encounter in a bout of exploration. You’re free to rearrange the cards, which gives you some control over the narrative, so having a higher Exploration stat means both that you’ll encounter more things at a time and that you have more ways to rearrange them to your liking.
You’ll face natural hazards, traps, weather, dangerous seas, and occasionally hostile humans. But the Rooks are more dangerous than anything else.
Rooks (think of the chess piece that looks like a castle tower) are simultaneously the most dangerous things you can find and also a source of pets (rooklings), magic (rookstones used to make magic helms), prosthetic armaments, and basically any other mechanical contraption within the game world. Traveling the world of Colostle will inevitably put you face to face with rooks.
You’re free to run away, but the promises of valuables are hard to turn down. If you want treasure, you’ll likely need to fight for it.
Danger is in the Cards
While exploring, you’ll eventually run into something hostile. Human, beast, or rook, combat works largely the same way. Your enemy draws some number of cards based on how dangerous they are (ex: 3 or 5 for rooks) and you draw a number of cards equal to your combat score, which ranges from 1 to 5. You use your cards to numerically exceed the cards drawn by your opponent, taking a wound for each card which you can’t beat.
Looking at the numbers of cards drawn by each side should give you an idea of the danger here. You max out at 5 cards, so facing a large rook means that your odds are at best 50/50. Each wound reduces one of your two stats: exploration and combat. Reach 0 and you’re done for.
The specifics of combat are intentionally abstract. Different varieties of attacks aren’t mechanically distinct, so an experienced, well-equipped character might describe fighting a rook by firing cannons at it, freezing it with ice magic, or climbing inside it to rip out its mechanical innards.
Colostle isn’t hard by any means (I won’t spoil what’s up the stairs), but it’s not without threats, and you’re forced to take risks to get more powerful. Even with the math in your favor, it’s still entirely possible that you draw five cards and lose a fight to a random person who drew a single king.
If you’re fortunate enough to succeed in combat, your opponent will leave you loot. Maybe an enemy human dropped a treasure, or maybe you salvage a new weapon from a defeated rook. Hold onto your treasures, if you’re lucky enough to collect them. If you can find a city, there’s trading to be done.
An Actual Play Report
The core rulebook includes a one-page example of the game being played that does a really great job explaining how things work in practice. I can’t reproduce that and I want an excuse to play Colostle, so Randall and I did a quick play session starting with a new character. Randall made decisions, I handled the tables since I ambushed him with a game that he had learned he would be playing some 5 minutes prior.
Creating a character is four steps: Calling, Nature, Class, Weapon. Randall decided his calling was to find someone who he had lied to as a child, causing them to go adventuring on a false pretense. He drew a card for nature, and got “sly, always planning.” He chose “The Followed” for his class (that’s the one with a pet rookling). We never discussed a weapon, but I’m going to say the rookling did the fighting.
Character complete, his starting stats were Exploration 5 and Combat 3. Fighting a large rook would be dangerous, but otherwise he should be okay.
We dove right into exploration. Randall drew 5 cards, which gave him a partially ruined door (the big ones which go between rooms in the Colostle), crumbling ruins of a people he’s never heard of, an untrustworthy person who needs help finding something in exchange for supplies, and two large rooks. He also got an event from one of the cards that was simply “hunger sets in”, so that stranger’s supplies looked appealing.
The rules give you an out here: If you draw duplicates, you can redraw one of them. You also have the choice to try to sneak past rooks (which doesn’t have a mechanic: you describe it as you see fit), so Randall wasn’t obligated to fight either/both rooks.
Randall described how he went through the great door into a ruined city with rooks perched to his left and right keeping watch. He snuck into the city and had a chance encounter with a stranger. The stranger offered to give Randall some supplies in exchange for helping them escape the ruins safely. At one point there was an argument that came to blows. Despite Randall having a 3-to-1 card advantage, the result was a “clash” so no one came away wounded. But the noise drew the attention of one of the rooks, so Randall and his frenemy turned to fight it.
The rook drew 5 cards, but, fortunately, many were low. He decided that his frenemy would contribute a card, too. There aren’t rules for this, but it felt like a fair way to handle things, and there’s no fun police here. Despite being down a card, Randall only failed to meet one attack, so he came away victorious with one wound.
Randall drew for treasure from the Rook. You automatically get +1 to either of your stats (which offset his wound from the fight), and he drew a rookling with a ranged attack as loot. With two rooklings in tow, Randall was feeling pretty good. His frenemy shared some supplies, and they parted ways.
All of this took maybe 15 minutes, including character creation.
Pain Points
Colostle is a tight, compact game with a lot to offer in a surprisingly small page count. But within those 60-ish pages, the crucial tables are spread throughout the book, often requiring the user to flip around based on what they’re doing. If you have a digital copy, you can open the book multiple times to have quick access to different tables, but the physical version will benefit from bookmarks. A consolidated version of the tables would be an asset for players who have gotten comfortable with the rules. Something like a DM screen or a rules appendix.
Rules for a couple of important points are also placed in odd places. The rules for dying when your stats hit 0 are in the exploration rules and not repeated in the rules for fighting. The rules for when to shuffle are similarly in the exploration rules, and, while it’s certainly possible to run out cards while drawing to explore, it’s equally likely that you’ll run out while fighting. Repeating those crucial concepts in multiple places or listing a page number would be helpful for new players.
Conclusion
I’m very impressed with Colostle. It’s a quick read due to the slim page count, the rules are simple to learn, and the randomization provides a wonderful balance between writing prompt and predetermined story. You get everything you need to tell quick, self-contained chunks of story. There’s a sense of surprise and mystery which I absolutely love.
The core rulebook includes a section for adventuring on water. If your character finds an ocean and you’re suitably equipped, you can take to the seas to see what fate awaits you there. This introduces some additional threats and some different tables, paving the way for additional expansions to the game to cover different environments with more specific threats.
Nich Angel, the author, has been hard at work since Colost’s release expanding the game. Nich publishes monthly content via the Colostle Patreon, and has published 3 expansion books, as well as an optional Jobs system which expands upon specific game mechanics. All of the expansions are available from the Colostle shop, and at just £8 for a PDF, each of those expansions is a lot of fun at a great price point.
Nich also just announced his upcoming game, Rookling Heroes; a 2-player battle card game featuring rooklings, the tiny living castles that players can encounter in the Roomlands.
I’m excited to see where Colostle goes. I’m going to find out what’s up those stairs. I bet it’s treasure. I hope it’s more Colostle.
Colostle is available physically from the Colostle website, and as PDFs from the Colostle website and on DriveThruRPG (affiliate link).
