Stardew Valley fans must play this TTRPG solo or with friends

From Tyler Crumrine of Possible Worlds Games, Grandpa’s Farm players take on the role of a person who has just inherited their grandfather’s long-neglected farm. The game takes place over the course of four years as you track your progress rebuilding the farm and connecting with your local community, all while writing letters back home to the people you love.

Each season in Grandpa’s Farm is represented by a turn that has players draw from a deck of playing cards. The values of each card randomly determine how much development has occurred, with face cards ending a given season. The card’s respective suit determines the type of progress being made: social, financial, agricultural, or infrastructural. At the end of each season, you write a letter to a love one recounting your progress, though that part of the game straddles the lines of fiction and reality. Grandpa’s Farm can be played alone, or with other people — with the potential to send physical letters back and forth to friends playing their own farm somewhere else in the world.

Built into the game is the same type of interpersonal community building you get from games like Stardew Valley, as relationships with your neighbors developing year over year. Each year can also be punctuated by an optional festival mechanic, where the small town community comes to life and players have the ability to gain mechanical advantages that allow play to last longer with better progress for their farmstead.

One of the strongest elements of Grandpa’s Farm is its worldbuilding phase. Prompted by questions like “What are you leaving behind to live on the farm?” or “What will be easier/harder about living on the farm?” players develop a fully realized sense of who they are before the game properly begins. Similar questions are posed about the community you’ll be moving into, developing a sense that this world existed before your character inherited this farm, and it will exist long after you are gone.

Like other games in the Possible Worlds catalogue, this book is small — both in length and size. A 4.5’ by 5.5” pocket sized paper back book, Grandpa’s Farm caps out at 30 pages in length, meaning the rules are digestible while still being comprehensive enough for a fleshed out experience. This physical minimalism is a signature style of many tabletop RPGs by Possible Worlds, such as its My Hero Academia-inspired Single Unique Powe or Wishless, a game about a world in which everyone received three wishes, and now you’re living in the consequences.