A Year at the Café

You keep a small café on a town square, and the town comes in every day: the same faces at the same tables, and now and then one you have never seen. You write down what happened. That is the whole game — one die, one pen, and about twenty minutes an evening.

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🌙 WHAT THIS IS

A solo RPG journal — a solo journaling game about one year behind the counter of a café.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You have six tables, a copper urn and a cake under a glass dome, and the town brings you its mornings, its gossip and its long afternoons. Most of them want coffee. Some of them want somebody to talk to. A few want to pay on Friday.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes in.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

✒️ Write three or four lines: what you put in front of them, what it cost, and what you did not say.

If the two rolls do not fit together — the band from the fair, wanting breakfast at four in the afternoon, and every one of them wanting ice — that tension IS the evening. You do not reroll. You write your way through it.

⚖️ You never roll to find out whether you succeed.

The die says what happens. You say what you did about it. There is no failure in this game, only what it cost.

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📦 WHAT YOU GET

▪ 162 written entries across 25 tables — every one of them rolled on a single d6

▪ 4 seasons, with 72 entries that belong to the seasons alone, and not one repeated

▪ 12 writing prompts, three per season, for evenings when you would rather write than roll

▪ 3 ending tables — which one you roll on depends on how you kept the café

▪ One day worked through from the first roll to the written entry, so the first evening does not start with a decision

▪ 8 journal sheets, because in a game you play by writing, the writing space is the product

▪ 20 pages · 4 PDFs

Nothing here is a stub. Every table is written out in full.

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🗝️ HOW THE YEAR STARTS

Six rolls and a name, and the café is yours.

Three for you — why the café is yours, what you are good at, and what you do not say.

Three for the place — the café itself, what is on the counter, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name. Whatever you paint over the door, within a month the town will be calling it after you.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE TOWN COMES IN FOR DIFFERENT THINGS IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — Windows open

On the first warm morning the door is propped open with a chair, the window comes off its catch, and the whole town finds a reason to walk past.

☀️ SUMMER — Tables outside

The tables go out onto the square, the ice comes round on a cart from the brewery cellar, and you sell more lemonade than coffee and never quite forgive the summer for it.

🍁 AUTUMN — Market days

The town comes back in from the fields, the market fills the square every Saturday, and by four o'clock the windows have started to steam.

❄️ WINTER — Steamed windows

It is dark at both ends of the day, the stove never goes out, and the café is the warmest room in town that anybody can sit in for the price of a cup.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

🌾 Flour ☕ Beans 🤝 Goodwill

Anything baked fresh takes a Flour. Anything brewed takes a Beans. Anything kind gives a Goodwill. A day moves one of them, never more, and together they are the reason the year has a shape instead of being a pile of evenings.

Whichever one is highest when the year ends decides which ending you roll on.

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📖 A FEW LINES FROM INSIDE

"The postman, every day at eleven, who reads you everybody's postcards and calls it delivering."

"Soup. You do not do soup, and by the end of the week you do soup."

"The sign over the door, which lost two of its letters in the spring gales and now says something rude."

"A man selling a new kind of coffee, who wants to explain it to you at length, for nothing."

"You count the cups and saucers. There are three more cups than saucers, and you will never know why."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You love cozy coffee shops, steamed windows and the regulars who always sit at the same table

▪ You want a cozy game that still has structure and consequences

▪ This would be your first solo RPG and you want one that explains itself

▪ You keep a journal and want prompts that build on each other instead of starting over

▪ You want twenty quiet minutes in the evening that are not a screen

▪ You are tired of combat and stat blocks

▪ You own one six-sided die and nothing else, and would like that to be enough

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🎒 WHAT YOU NEED

▪ This book

▪ A pen

▪ One six-sided die

▪ Somewhere quiet, ideally with a cup of something

That is the list. No deck of cards, no second die, no app, and no account.

It is made for one player. If you want somebody else in it, take a season each: read the other person's entries before you start yours, and do not discuss them. The café carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the flour.

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🚫 WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No combat. No monsters. No magic. No stat blocks and no character sheet.

Nothing here is fought. If somebody comes in with something you cannot help, you cannot help them, and you write that down.

It is six tables, a town square, and four seasons of regulars and strangers.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the seventh book. A Year at the Wayside (an inn on a quiet road), A Year at the Lending Library (a small town library), A Year at the Ferry (a rope ferry on a river), A Year on the Salt Road (a salt cart on a long road), A Year at the Apothecary (a country apothecary) and A Year at the Witch's Cottage (a cottage at the edge of the wood) use the same rules with a different place, different people and different things running out. Each book stands on its own.

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📄 THE FILES

Two zip files, one for each paper size, so you only download the one you print on:

▪ A4 — colour and ink-saver

▪ US Letter — colour and ink-saver

The ink-saver build drops the tint and the cover painting and keeps every word. Same book, same 20 pages, cheaper to run — and the journal sheets are the ones you will reprint.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

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🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

Games for a table, and for a chair by the fire.