Spine - Play Review
I've made two attempts at solo RPGs in the past. Tim Hutchinson's Thousand Year Old Vampire and Fox Curios Floating Bookshop. I enjoyed both experiences but both ended up being just a taste of the intended experience. I ended up burning out on Vampire after delving too deeply into Wikipedia to answer a prompt. Floating Bookshop had a similar ending where I drew something like 11 visitors the first day and wrote way too much. But Siderius Plug's Immortality in Ninety-nine Endnotes (or SPINE) is now the first solo TTRPG I've fully played and let's not bury the lede: I really enjoyed it.
SPINE kept me engaged for the entire time I played it, barring one single instance. I was always excited to come back and play again. The thing that sticks out to me is that playing requires only this book and a pencil. It's not a choose your own adventure, it's something else, related, but different.
Playing SPINE is quick, tactile and has a low barrier to entry. You read the book and find superscript number leading to an endnotes on every page. Flipping to the back of the book will give you an endnote (surprise!) and prompts: many of them are writing and some of them... are other things. You read through the book and the endnotes, completing the prompts as directed. There are a few prompts hidden behind a spiral circle that if you read, you must complete.
This worked for me. Playing SPINE was propulsive. You keep reading through the text, flipping to the endnote and then completing a prompt. No Wikipedia rabbit holes, no burning yourself out by writing too much text. Read, choose an endnote, complete the prompt, repeat. Spiral further and interact with your book in strange ways.
The style of the book helps a lot here. SPINE is a collection of several texts: history and poetry, mostly. No walls of words, just enough to get your teeth into and hook you with a mystery. I found space enough for my narrative to put down roots and grow into.
1000 Year Old Vampire is meant to be played in the book, but it's too small to fit the intended prompts. Too beautiful to mar with my unworthy scribbles. The paper's also glossy and hard to write on. SPINE does not have these issues. The physical product is cheap (in the US, at least) and has nice toothy paper. It's all scribbled up with my pencil work and now I have an amazing artifact of my game of SPINE.
And this may be the best part. SPINE is replayable, so now the next person to play my copy is going to have a unique experience. No other play of SPINE will be the same. I'm so intrigued by what they'll think and feel as they play SPINE with my marked up book, choosing new prompts (mine are mostly crossed out) and making their own scribbles. This game wants you to play alone, but then bring others in and play with you. Discuss your experiences and then pass it along again. Great stuff.
While I didn't experience much bleed, unlike Idle Cartulary, I had a wonderful time. The only blemish on the experience was a cipher puzzle that required a bit more work than I was looking for. Thankfully you can skip it. I'd encourage you to give SPINE a shot. It's a unique experience that truly uses the book well.