TTRPG Thoughts: Last Tea Shop (Classic)

The classic verion of Last Tea Shop is a FREE single-page TTRPG developed by Spring Villager. (There is now an 18-page expanded edition available to buy). It's also the first ever solo TTRPG that I played when I learned about journaling games. I was initially wary, in fact; at first glance, solo games didn't seem like they could hold my attention.

Boy, was I wrong.

What I ended up really enjoying about Last Tea Shop> is how it has such potential as a series of writing prompts. I took the journaling part of the game very seriously during my first playthrough, and ended up with over a thousand words in a Google doc before calling it quits for the night. I got attached to my little tea shop and my nameless shopkeeper, who sang songs for a family of mice and constantly (sometimes fearfully) wondered what lay around the next bend in the road.

Part of what initially attracted me to Last Tea Shop was how I was reminded of Becky Chambers' 2022 sci-fi novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, about a nonbinary monk who runs a mobile tea shop (with built-in therapy services) who is forced to confront the often-ignored question of, "Who cares for the caretakers?" I can't recommend it enough; reading that novella felt like being served a warm cup of tea by someone who loves me.

Books aside, Last Tea Shop is an absolutely wonderful tool for character creation. The shopkeeper is purposefully kept as something of a blank slate in the single page of rules, but I couldn't help giving them more of a personality as I went along in the game. The questions your shopkeeper asks the patrons forces you to come up with backstories for each patron, and I actually made myself cry as my shepherd patron described having to sell the sheepdog who was her closest friend.

I also think that the game ends itself well. The arrival of the Veiled One is easy to incorporate into many, many types of endings, or else as the signal of a new beginning that goes beyond the scope of the game. Last Tea Shop is setting agnostic and could be incorporated into just about any imaginary world, and I like how the game handles the more spiritual aspects of a tea shop on the border between life and death; the Veiled One isn't cast as either sinister or benign in the rules, and whatever lies beyond the tea shop is entirely up to the discretion of the player. Overall, this is a wonderful little game that manages to feel very expansive while remaining compact and requiring nothing more than a d6, writing implements, and your imagination.