Pocket TTRPG Roundup: Part Three
Another installment of my review mini-series about literally pocket-sized RPGs. See Part One for the explanation, and Part Two for more of … whatever this is.
Storytelling Mints
Publisher: Archmage Arispen
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 3¼” x 2⅛” x ¾”
Players: 1+
Yet another joint from Archmage Arispen, maker of the previously reviewed Tinny Dungeons. Storytelling Mints feels like a GM’s tool that somehow evolved into an actual RPG. This one has zero moving parts; no dice, no player sheets, no pencils, nothing but the cards in the tin and a song in your heart.
Storytelling Mints comes with one Player Guide card, one Game Master Guide card, 24 double-sided PC / plot cards, and a wee little hinged tin to hold everything.
Gameplay: Before play begins, the Game Master draws four plot cards at random. Each card has four sections: a Goal, a Location, an Obstacle, and a Twist. The GM silently reads one line from each card, then uses them as inspiration to create a secret quest seed.
Meanwhile, the players turn the deck over and choose their PCs from the characters described on the other side. Each character card lists a character name (ignorable), a race/class pair (mostly fluff), Strengths, Weaknesses, and Gear.
Notice how the bottom of each character card has an upside-down area containing one of four phrases: “Yes, And,” “Yes, But,” “No, And,” and “No, But.” I think you can see what’s coming.
To begin, the GM describes the world and is urged to start in action. Then play unfolds in a pure narrative style, funneled into the quest seed created earlier. A PC’s Strengths and Weaknesses make it easier or harder to do certain actions, and their Gear exists to do cool things with.
If the players want to try something risky, they draw a card and look at the inverted text on the character side. They succeed on a “yes,” fail on a “no,” and other stuff happens depending on their ands or buts.
Yes. This game runs on amateur improv.
There are no stats or anything; such limitations are only in your mind, maaan. It’s up to the GM to keep everyone engaged and the plot moving, and players are equally encouraged to add details and help shape the story.
By the end, the main quest was either successfully completed or utterly derailed. Nothing really happens either way. As you might expect, there’s no leveling up and no long campaign structure. The most you can do is get the GM to draw four more cards and climb back on that treadmill. The play really is the thing.
The provided PCs are very, very D&D coded in their race and class combos. There’s an Aasimar, a Tiefling, and an Aarakocra in the mix. Also a couple Goblins, so … some Pathfinder sneaking in there too, maybe? This isn’t a deal-breaker (and may be a bonus for some groups) but it feels … I dunno, infringe-y.
Also, and this is a much bigger thing: Removing cards from the main deck (for instance, when the PCs choose their character cards or the GM deals themselves the plot) changes the ratio of Yeses and Noes to be drawn during gameplay. I count 6 Yes Ands, 7 Yes Buts, 7 No Buts, and 4 No Ands in the deck. If you have a bunch of players who all want characters with Yes Ands on the bottom, they’ll end up inadvertently skewing the game negatively for themselves. The characters on the Yes cards aren’t particularly special compared to the No cards, so there’s no reason not to grab up all the No Ands and make the game easier.
This can be mitigated by either dealing PCs randomly, or else just taking a snap of the card(s) on your phones and returning everything to the deck. But there’s that niggling feeling that a different randomizer could have fixed this …
Pocket fit: The tin is about half the size of an Altoids tin by volume. It doesn’t even have extra parts inside to rattle around and disturb your prayer group. A-.
Legibility: Mostly good, with a mix of serif and sans-serif (for headers) typefaces. Text on the plot side gets difficult to see in spots, due to light-colored ink on the bright white background. A line or two on the character side is equally hard to read for being white text on a light-ish background. Not nearly as illegible as Pocket World of Dungeons, though, which has altered my perception for all subsequent reviews. B.
Completeness: Once again, we have a game with no leveling, no monsters, and no campaigns. But it does come with a kinda neat story generator that can generate over 250,000 plots (or so claims their advertising). And the game itself does have a complete gameplay loop, with lots of options for the players to choose from. So. B-.
Final thoughts: If nothing else, Storytelling Mints is a master class in compact game design. I really do think this was originally meant to be a simple RPG story generator, and Arispen had a wild hair to throw in a game to go with it. And it even works, after a fashion! I’d almost pick this up for the plot stuff alone, but a game on top of that is like getting chocolate in your peanut butter.
Two things prevent me from giving this my full recommendation, though: the vibey, improv-driven gameplay which is not every table’s cup of tea, and its current $22 USD price tag. I mean, cripes, man. When I bought this a few months ago it was cheaper, but I think, you know, the world situation today has really stuck this game in the shorts. If it were like $10-15, it’d be a more solid choice. As it is, only consider this if you really vibe with the concept.
POCKET (Card Edition)
Publisher: Barely Playtested
Year: 2022
Dimensions: 2″ x 3½” (business card size) x ¼”
Players: 2+
POCKET (Card Edition) is a straightforward mini-OSR-like, which mostly stands apart from the competition by its formatting. The entire system fits on five business cards (double-sided), which read as if the cards were chapters in a very small book.
Besides the cards, players need a d20 (preferably one for each player), something to write with, and something to write their character info on. No char sheets provided this time.
Gameplay: To build a character, players simply choose a Race (which nets some sort of bonus, like a Dwarf’s resistance to poison or a Gnome’s ability to speak to small animals) and a Class. Each of the 12 Classes provides characters with their HP, starting skills, weapon/armor proficiencies, and special abilities. The player then chooses one armor set and three weapons from a short list, and they’re off to the slaughter.
Characters don’t have stats per se, instead having four very broad Skills: Athletics, Subterfuge, Lore, and BWAM (“Base Weapon Attack Modifier”). These are added to d20 rolls when they attempt stuff. To perform a task or resist an effect, roll the die and add your skill versus a Difficulty Check (DC) either laid out in the rules or chosen by the GM. To attack, do the same but add your BWAM versus the opponent’s AC (ideally shouting “BWAM!” when you do so). All weapons do fixed damage, so one roll does it all.
One thing to note here is that the weakest provided monster, the Dire Rat, has 6 HP, and the only weapons that inflict more than 6 HP in one blow are 2-Handed (plus a few spells, but there’s no guarantee you’ll have them prepared; see below). Nearly all fights will therefore be battles of attrition. GMs will need to be careful with their encounter balancing. The rules are silent on all this.
One card-side contains a list of 20 magic spells. Magic-using classes randomly roll from this list to find out which spell(s) they’ve prepared each in-game day. For any class except Wizard, their choice is limited to only part of the list. For instance, Druids will roll one spell per day from spells 6-10 on the list, Clerics roll two spells from 1-10, and Wizards roll three spells per day from the whole thing.
Magic-users also get extra powers from and/or beyond this list. Druids can speak to, and turn into, plants and animals. Clerics get an extra Heal spell automatically. Warlocks get an at-will Eldritch Blast spell and can cast Darkness once per day. Wizards gain an at-will Magic Missile. Bards can cast Guidance three times a day and can sing to raise party morale as a standard action.
The non-magic classes get their own quirks too, from a Barbarian’s Rage to a Ranger’s animal companion to a Fighter’s simple mix of high Athletics, impressive BWAM, and a bonus to opportunity attacks. The classes feel kind of 3e-ish, if that makes sense. They aren’t all super exciting but they get the job done.
One final card is occupied with 12 monster listings, from the previously mentioned Dire Rats all the way up to Dragons. It’s a smattering of the greatest FRPG hits. No orcs though.
Pocket fit: Easy peasy. Even the d20s, pencils, and slips of paper for character notes hardly drag it down. A-.
Legibility: It ain’t fancy, but that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s around a 9-point serif font, spaced well, with clear headings and simple tables. It’s pretty readable even for its size. B.
Completeness: System-wise this is the barest of bones, but it still hits all the notes. It has a pleasant and diverse selection of races and classes, a solid handful of monsters, and decently enumerated rules. No leveling up and no campaign structure, though, and also no guidance for a GM at all. That all comes out to around a C.
Final thoughts: The word “workmanlike” popped into my head a lot while looking over this game. It’s well constructed but aggressively vanilla. Nothing about it made me go “wow” or “ugh.” I could definitely see someone using POCKET to run an OSR module with a minimum of tweaking, but out-of-the-box it’s just a toolkit.
It’s also free on itch.io, so I don’t feel like I should crap on it too much. And hey, it does work. So. Have at it, champ.
Next time: It’s the little things in life, you know?