Ever since the 1.0 update was released I’ve been playing… a goodly amount of Fields of Mistria. And as I always end up doing, my thoughts turned to how I might get some of this good storytelling, farming, “settle into a new life” vibes in some solo tabletop games.
Oh… you want to see how far along my farm is? Let’s, ah… here, have a screenshot of Hayden. Pay no mind to the barren field I only touch enough to fulfill my museum collections. 😅
So I found a dig site on the road, smacked it with my iron pickaxe (I haven’t made it to silver quite yet, don’t judge me, I’m too busy trying to keep affording daily Tea with Lemon to use in wooing Hayden), and out popped these ten solo tabletop games that scratch that Mistrian itch.
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Iron Valley
Who knew Ironsworn could be so… cozy?
If there’s one game on this list that’s basically Fields of Mistria with the serial numbers filed off, it’s this one. Iron Valley by M. Kirin takes the bones of the really fantastic solo gameplay Ironsworn and Starforged (which, for the record, are excellent games to check out if you’re into solo adventuring) and repurposes them to let you move into a small community, restore a family farm, and build a new life one day at a time. The game is a chunky 244 pages, with lots to explore, including a full “Passage of Time” system tracking the days and seasons as you play.
The game is pretty simple to learn, and its system of “world truths” means you can have a completely different vision of the community in which you live each time you play. The game revolves heavily around “making and keeping promises to your friends, yourself, and your frienemies,” which promises some fun encounters between rounds of planting.
Iron Valley is a cozy solo ttrpg hack for Ironsworn and Starforged.
In this game you take the role of someone moving into a small community and starting their life anew. Maybe you’ll restore your family’s farm. Maybe you’ll explore the mysterious forest just beyond town. Maybe you’ll fall in love and get married! This is a game about living a cozy life with good company, one day at a time.
Grandpa’s Farm
A letter-writing game about inheriting a farmstead that no one has touched in years
Another game at the top of this list that feels exceptionally on-theme. Grandpa’s Farm puts you into the role of an inheritor of a long-neglected farm (sound familiar?) and spending the next few years in-game bringing it back to working order. It stands apart, however, in that it’s built around telling the story of your farm’s progress in the form of letters sent to a loved on each season. Draw some cards to figure out the progress you made that season and then sit and write home about your experiences.
This epistolary format is really fun to me, forcing you to sort of narratively compress things down in a way that a looser journal format doesn’t really offer. It’s a decision of “what is important enough to include in a letter home” which really puts a lens on the emotional core of the whole story. The game also has some optional festival mechanics which sound fun, and can even be run in parallel with other friends who are running their own farms.
Grandpa’s Farm is a letter-writing roleplaying game inspired by slow-life video games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and Stardew Valley. In Grandpa’s Farm, you’ve inherited a long-neglected farmstead and are about to spend the next four years of your life getting it up and running again.
Koriko: A Magical Year
A tarot-and-dice game about a teenage witch’s year away from home
The magic in Fields of Mistria is one of the things I really like about it (not to mention the in-progress long-term plan I have to romance a mystical statue of an unknowable and ancient dragon that for some reason is on my property). Koriko: A Magical Year by Jack Harrison has a vibe that really fits well with Mistria and its magic, putting you in the shoes of a young witch spending a year in an unfamiliar city. I’ve played this one a few times, and the mechanic that has you stacking a tower of d6 dice as the year goes on really adds a fun physical element to the game.
This one is broken up over seven seasons in the city of Koriko, so it gives a really satisfying span of time and lets you play over multiple sessions. You’ll walk away with a fascinating story recorded in your journal entries and letters home.
This is a game for one player, designed for contemplative solo play. It’s a bubbling cauldron of simple rules and writing prompts, stirred together to produce the story of a teenage witch spending a year away from home in an unfamiliar city called Koriko.
The game’s primary inspiration is Kiki’s Delivery Service, both the Studio Ghibli film and the Eiko Kadono novel. I’ve watched the film countless times as it’s one of my son’s favourites, and its story and themes have burrowed their way deep into my soul.
Wander Witch: A Cozy RPG of Fairies and Witches
Mossy forests, sweater-knitting dragons, and pixie barn dances
Where Iron Valley and Grandpa’s Farm chase the feeling of the “settling down on a farm” half of Mistria (and do it pretty well), Wander Witch by Ty Hulse really goes after the “wandering into a half-forgotten world full of delightful oddballs” half. Hulse built it using the Belonging Outside Belonging system, and you can explore this enchanted realm that even most of its own fairies have forgotten either solo or with friends.
This game feels like it hits similar storyline beats to the really lovely handling of the townsfolk in Fields of Mistria, how each person has their own quirks and their own subplots going all the time. The whole design philosophy of Wander Witch feels very “make the world feel inhabited by strange, gentle beings with their own stories.”
There is a longing within our hearts to experience magical moments. Moments of wonder, bliss, and perhaps of deep concern – so long as comradery is involved. The magical world is filled with these moments, for it is an enchanted realm, one mostly forgotten even by the fairies and witches.
This land is filled with tales that gush forth with excitement from every ancient fairy who remembers the times before and every child who imagines how things should be. Fairyland is filled with secrets so ancient even most fairies have forgotten. There are rock spirits who remember drifting through space before there was a world to rest on and mountain spirits who watched the birth of the first grassy meadows.
This is your chance to try and have conversations with these magical beings. To travel and seek the ineffable sense of home and belonging.
Fairy: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Low-Prep Fantasy Solo Journaling RPG
Exactly what it says on the tin, as the highest compliment
Sometimes, when you’re plopping down with some dice and a journal to play some solo games, you don’t want 250 pages of world-truths and lore hooks. Sometimes you just want to open a PDF and start playing in the next ten minutes. Fairy by Megan Fuentes uses quick prep (with a personality quiz to help shape your character) to get you into some great, low-stakes fantasy journaling that doesn’t ask much more than simply showing up.
This is a great option to share with a friend who wants to try solo TTRPGs but might be scared off by a whole deep system they have to learn. It feels very much like the first ten minutes of Mistria, when you’re exploring the town, meeting the locals, and haven’t even planted a single crop.
FAIRY is a cozy, low-stakes solo journaling RPG where you play as your own fairysona!
Take the included personality quiz and use the prompts to build out your fairy’s role in nature, the environment they live in, the other fairies they know, and more. Super beginner-friendly, endlessly replayable, and easy to pick up and play whenever. Add the PDF to your favorite note-taking app and play digitally, or print the pages and glue into a notebook. Up to you!
The Broken Cask
A solitaire in keeping game for anyone who’d rather run the Sleeping Dragon Inn than get all dirty on a farm
Not every cozy life sim game is about farm tools and seeds. Fields of Mistria does a great job at the “become a beloved fixture of the town” angle too (even if March takes a while to stop being such a jerk), and The Broken Cask by Derek A. Kamal does a great job of capturing this side of it. Build your inn, hire your staff, deal with wyrm attacks and drunken brawls, and generally pilot your little business through whatever chaos the dice might throw your way.
The framing of this game is great, honestly, a chill business-management sim in a fantasy town with all of the charms of watching the regulars become friends over time.
The Broken Cask is a solitaire innkeeping roleplaying game. Well, what in the world does all that mean?
It means your dining room table covered in papers and charts; it’s slinging dice to find out what happens next; it’s hoping that slowcoach cook of yours can get the next meal out in time for a hefty tip and wondering who will come through the door next.
Wanderhome
A pastoral game about traveling animal folk and the changing of the seasons
While not strictly a solo tabletop game out of the box, Wanderhome by Jay Dragon is built as a GM-less experience and plays beautifully as a solo journaling experience. And honestly, the seasonal structure of the game alone earns it a spot on the list. No dice, no combat, just animal folk wandering a beautiful, gentle world called Hæth as the seasons turn around them.
If Mistria’s soft, watercolor-adjacent art and “every season brings a fun new festival” pacing has you hooked, Wanderhome will feel like a perfect fit.
Also, the book is just absurdly beautiful, and I’ve had fun every time I’ve gotten the delightful chance to play.
Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy role-playing game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change. It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine.
You might be a tamarin who dances with small and forgotten gods, a leporine mail carrier who relies on moths to get packages where they belong, a little lizard with a big heart and a mysterious past, or a near-endless number of other thrilling possibilities. No matter what, we’re always travelers—animal-folk who go from village to village and get to see the length and breadth of all the world of Hæth. The seasons will change as we play, and we will change with them.
Apothecaria
Become the village’s new witch and start brewing some potions
This list would be woefully incomplete if I didn’t include Blackwell Games’ Apothecaria. After all, why should Juniper have all the fun whipping up potions in the bathhouse? In Apothecaria you’ll step into the shoes of a village’s new resident witch, filling in for a predecessor who went mysteriously missing, and diagnose magical ailments for your neighbors and brewing up cures.
The designer’s own pitch is that this game blends Theme Hospital with Stardew Valley with a does of Studio Ghibli, which honestly tracks (and feels very Mistrian). It’s a genuinely gorgeous game that I’ve spent a lot of time brewing potions in, and it has tons of prompts for sketching out ingredients and writing up patients’ increasingly ridiculous ailments.
Apothecaria is a solo journalling RPG in which you take the role of a village witch creating potions for the unfortunate villagers, adventurers, and monsters that come to you for help. The potions you create and the stories that unfold come together to create a beautiful journal that is unique and personal to you. Fill pages with drawings of ingredients, stories of run-ins with thieving fairies and sleeping giants, and recipes for the potions you have created to keep you right in the future.
With loads of unique ailments like Fairy Fever, Candlesick, and Yeti Chest, Apothecaria aims to capture the humour and feel of games like Theme Hospital and Stardew Valley with the cosiness and wonder of Studio Ghibli films.
Village Witch
A solo journaling game about a witch finding a home
Where Apothecaria drops you into an established village, Eliot Crow’s Village Witch is all about the search for a new home itself. You’ve just finished your training and are given a year to find the place you actually want to build a life in. The game uses a standard deck of playing cards (or my favorite tool in solo games, a deck of tarot cards) to offer prompts that shape your journey towards putting down roots somewhere that feels right.
The framing of this game feels very true to Mistria’s opening hours, where you’ve landed somewhere new and slowly feeling more and more like this place is home.
You’ve completed your training and are ready to become a village witch. You’ve been sent by the order to find a village to work in and have a year to find the place you want to make your life.
Letters from the Hidden Cottage
Tend to your cottage, brew healing potions, and rediscover what it means to live gently
I’ll be honest, this game’s pitch is what caught my attention, and it feels like a sigh of contentment. Letters from the Hidden Cottage by Foxglove Games is all about slowing way down. There’s no combat, no points, no rush of seasons. You’re simply tending to a cottage tucked away between the hedgerows and wild thyme, brewing potions and adding some magic to your day.
This game is very much of the side of Fields on Mistria shown on lazy Sundays in-game. No festival prep, crops are watered, go relax by the river. It pulls this comfortable vibe really nicely into a solo journaling game, with some really lovely artwork throughout. If you’ve ever found yourself just enjoying your lovingly customized Mistrian farm house and enjoying how cozy it is, this game is for you.
This is a cozy solo journalling RPG where you’ll tend to your cottage, brew healing potions, and rediscover what it means to live gently. It’s a game about slowing down, savouring quiet rituals, and weaving a little magic into the everyday. If you’re craving something whimsical, soothing and enchanting, this is for you.
Multiple games from this list are already on my shelf (or are now very high on that “to play” list to get added to my shelf), and do a really great job of channeling some of the charm and activity of Fields of Mistria into a solo tabletop experience. Whether you’re wanting the full faming sim experience of Iron Valley or the ten-minute gentleness of Fairy, there is something touching on each part of life in Mistria.
Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to get Hayden his Tea with Lemon and see what Caldarus is up to!
Graycastle Press is Luke Miller
Building games, homebrew, modules, and digital tools for the tabletop community and beyond with a unique brand of creativity and sense of humor. Publisher of the bestselling solo worldbuilding roleplaying game Journey.
Specializing in games that offer new methods of engaging with your creative work. Go on an adventure and return with the choicest loot: fresh ideas and inspiration. Use it to add even more spark to the things you build.