Tea & Toadstools

From La Lionne Publishing comes Tea & Toadstools, a solo GM-less journaling game built using the Carta SRD. In this charming and warm TTRPG, you are documenting the life and days of Hedgie: a hedgehog in a twill vest who really just wants to enjoy a nice, quiet cup of tea. Will you get to enjoy your tea? Maybe! But even if you don’t, there’s always tomorrow. 

Basking in the sun with a cup of tea is a great goal for any hedgehog, and is what Hedgie is hoping to do. The problem is that all their neighbours and friends are trying to get their attention and help for any number of tasks! Your goal is to have Hedgie make their escape to their toadstool home before the neighbourhood busybodies take up all their time and energy.

Coming in at ten pages, Tea & Toadstools offers a silly and thought-provoking game experience as you try to make your home home to relax. To play, you need a copy of the game, a standard deck of playing cards, a marker to represent Hedgie, a way to track tokens, and an optional journal to document Hedgie’s journey. 

This is the third release I’ve reviewed from Anya (@lalionnecosplay)! If you’re looking for a 5e compatible mystery set at a festival, check out Mystery at the Starlight Festival [here], and if solo journaling: horror edition is something you’re interested in, I would suggest Mountaintop Isolation [here] (you can read my playthrough [here]). Tea & Toadstools is a Carta game, which means at its base the idea is that players lay cards out in a grid, and then turn them over one at a time, exploring prompts and mechanics as they do – it has a nice mix of story and boardgame feel to it!

I received a preview copy of Tea & Toadstools for review purposes and will always be transparent about times where this happens! 

Overview

Hedgie the Hedgehog is trying to get home to enjoy a nice, quiet cup of tea! The neighbours have a different idea, however, and so the question becomes: will Hedgie get home before running out of time and patience? You start the game with 8 Resources, which you lose (and gain) as you move around the board and draw prompt cards. If you run out of resources before getting home (represented by the goal card – the Queen of Diamonds), the day ends without Hedgie being able to enjoy that nice brew. This could be the end of your game! Or you can use the alternate rules provided to continue the story into the next day to see if Hedgie gets to find any peace from their nosy neighbours!

The prompts are divided by the four card suits and correspond to four different elements of the game. These are: The Path, Helping Paw, Botheration, and Community. Within each suit there are cards that will drain your resources – such as helping a neighbour with a task, and cards that will see you gain a resource – like finding an unexpected berry patch and taking one to snack on later! Not every card is associated with a question-based prompt, but each card will give you a new element to the narrative. Each “turn,” then, you are going to either lose or gain resources – and some cards will see you losing two! You start with eight resources but depending on the cards you draw can wind up with as many as twelve!

My Thoughts

The alternate rules are all highlights for me! I like that there isn’t a ‘lose’ state in Tea & Toadstools, and this makes sense as it doesn’t feel like a game based around winning. Just because Hedgie doesn’t get their cup of tea on the first day doesn’t mean they can’t try again tomorrow, or the next day, or as many days as is required to finally sit and have some time to themselves! I also like that with these rules you could pick up and put down Hedgie’s story multiple times. Maybe you only have time to play through one day, but don’t’ get to enjoy that cup of tea – with the alternate rules it’s easy to pick up where you left off and continue on Hedgie’s journey.

Talking about time and game length, there are suggestions for how to make your games shorter, or longer, as well! I really appreciate when games offer these options as it’s a reminder that there isn’t just one way to play, and that you can always adjust a game to better suit your needs. By the same token, there’s also a note about how to approach prompts! This goes back to the Carta system itself and how it blends story game and boardgame – if you want to approach Tea & Toadstools more like a board game, you can! While designed as a solo GMless journaling game, you don’t need to journal! You can think about what Hedgie did, or how they might have reacted, and move onto the next prompt if that is what works best for you.

With these alternate rules, I played a quick game using a 4×4 card grid and approached it more like a board game than a story game. My day ended about halfway through the grid, and while Hedgie had a very busy day spending time with their community, friends, and helping others, they did not get to enjoy their cup of tea. By day’s end they were feeling pretty harried, but also enjoyed a sense of accomplishment for having made progress on a project they’d been putting off, and feeling good about having helped out an injured villager. 

For my game, I took note of the cards I drew and what Hedgie encountered during the day, tracking my remaining resources at the end of each sentence. From there I built a story loosely in my head, ending my day when I ran out of resources. I was short, simple, and sweet! The longest part of setup was finding the Ace of Clubs (the card you start on) and the Queen of Diamonds (your goal card, marking your successful return home to your tea) and setting them aside while shuffling the deck. 

I’m always a fan of games that have minimal setup and allow me to jump right in, and Tea & Toadstools definitely succeeds in this. When Anya and I first spoke about the game, I’d said I wasn’t going to have time to do a review but would offer my thoughts privately but then… Well, here we are! Because it was so straightforward it was easy to get my thoughts together here to talk about the game. As both a player and a reviewer, I appreciate that! Being able to quickly understand what I need to do to start playing is a strong asset for any game.

The card suits all have charming titles, and the associated prompts are all broad enough to give creative freedom in telling your story, while also giving you a strong sense of the general tone of Hedgie’s community. There’s a nice balance struck between silly and frustrating: as a player I knew I’d be frustrated by, say, crows coming and stealing my laundry, but that in the confines of the game is a sort of lighthearted fun that is doing no real harm.

The game is also very pretty! With formatting design graphics from Alderdoodle [here], and a beautiful cover illustration showing Hedgie and their toadstool from Natalie Chenard [here], Tea & Toadstools successfully delivers a cozy, warm, and comfortable feeling throughout its pages.

To Conclude

I think Tea & Toadstools is a light-hearted and charming game whose trio of alternate rules offer customizable gameplay in order to create a game that works best for your needs at the moment! There is something very relatable about just wanting to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea in peace, and that simply not happening. I like to think Hedgie will get to enjoy many a quiet cup as people receive their copies of Tea & Toadstools from the crowdfundr [here]!

You can pick up Tea & Toadstools on Itch.io for $8 USD [here]. If you’d like to keep up with everything Anya is doing, including working on new cosplays, games, and being a pro GM, you can find her [here].

Stay cozy!