Ornithologists Journal (Review)

In 2020, two people sent me copies of solo RPGs. (In one case explicitly for review, but in this case that was left unclear.) Solo games were having a moment in 2020, but the pandemic never afforded me the same solitude as others, so I’m only getting to them now.

The cover of Ornithologists Journal.

Ornithologists Journal is a solo journaling game by Eric K. Hill built on the Troika! rule set.¹ It’s a one-page (double-sided) pamphlet available for $1 on itch.io. You play as an enthusiastic xeno-ornithologist attempting to paint and catalog birds until your frustrations and doubts inevitably overtake you. At that point, the game ends, but you are left with a character perfect for joining a more traditional Troika! game.

First Impressions

Each day, you do the following:

1. Note the weather outside (sunny, cloudy, or thundering), or roll on the provided table.²
2. Choose a location (forest, mountain, lake, etc.).
3. Roll for a random event (this will usually modify the bird-watching roll somehow).
4. Roll for bird-watching: take the lower of 2d6 and cross-reference it with the birds in your chosen location.
5. If the current weather is marked for your bird, you will need to test sneaking to watch the bird (roll under).
6. Roll your painting skill vs. the bird’s elusiveness score (opposed roll) to paint the bird before it flees.
7. Rest for the day: if you haven’t painted any bird today, decrement your sanity score (the game ends when you run out). For each of the skills you’ve tested today, attempt to roll over to increase them.

There are some technical issues with the pamphlet. The procedure as it is necessarily implemented in play is presented out of order, and a note about the weather appears in the wrong bullet point. I might have liked to see the “screen” layout in a single column, for easier browsing on a phone. More generally, all the parts of the process that are technically part of the Troika! rules are left out or implied (character creation, improving advanced skills, and so on). They don’t take up that much room, and I think the game would benefit a lot from including them.

More broadly speaking, I think the presentation would also benefit from a cleaner split between the solo and “standard” parts of play. For example, if character creation were moved to a separate section about “finishing the game,” then it would be clearer throughout the solo portion that money, provisions, luck, stamina, and so on are concerns for an entirely unrelated game.

The Play Experience

As a numbers game, xeno-ornithology is a meat-grinder of a field. There are three ways to fail on a given day:

• Roll the tourist event (⅙) and fail a patience test.
• Roll a bird with a weather-specific indicator (~½) and fail a sneaking test.
• Fail the opposed painting vs. elusiveness roll.

All of these tests are usually in your favor, but the way they compound lowers the odds of success significantly and is very sensitive to small changes in skill and elusiveness. If we say a usual elusiveness is 7 and we start on day one with a base skill of 5, then our odds of successfully painting a bird that day are:

${\displaystyle (\frac{1}{6}P(2d6\le 8)+\frac{5}{6})\times (\frac{1}{2}P(2d6\le 8)+\frac{1}{2})\times P((2d6+8)>(2d6+7))\approx 45.7\mathrm{\%}}$

If the bird’s elusiveness is only one higher (8), these odds drop to only ~36.4%! Or, if we have a base skill of only 4, we still only have ~41% odds of painting a bird. Some of this is counter-balanced by the way Troika! skills are learned with use, but they need to be learned fast enough to “race” the end of the game. YMMV, but my ornithologist only lasted about a week.

Practically speaking, the game shouldn’t feel any more complex than one of those jokey one-page solo RPGs that are mostly just deterministic death spirals. But somehow it’s captured some of the same magic as Wordle, and claimed space for itself as a reflective daily routine. Maybe the small act of checking the weather out the window grounds it in the world just enough. Sure, you could just burn-out your ornithologist in a half-hour’s time, but why would you? And the Troika! character-creation minigame gimmick shouldn’t work, but it does. The idea that you can play a solo RPG in the present but eventually bring that character back to the table with friends, or that you can spend a little time reflecting every day but eventually you can bring your improved self back into the world, it feels very 2020. But it also feels generally optimistic in a way that I find charming.

Otto's only successful bird painting.

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1. Troika! of course, is a reworking of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, the multiplayer variant of the rules that power the Fighting Fantasy line of solo RPG books. “And yet a trace of the true self,” etc.↩︎

2. Thunderstorms being relatively rare, I guess “optimal play” is probably to roll for weather every day.↩︎

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