Lost in Alone Among the Stars

 I have described Alone Among the Stars as the journaling game you have to try to figure out if you want to play any others. That’s because it is both very flexible and accessible and can be as king or as short as you want it to be.

Here’s the elevator pitch. You are a lone space explorer. You use dice and a deck of cards to determine individual encounters/ discoveries/ scenes. You write down a journal entry for each and you can stop any time. Whenever you stop, the rules explicitly have you decide to either keep the journal or get rid of it. 

There’s also an online application for Alone Among the Stars, making it even easier for causally play. It has also inspired a ton of hacks. Heck, I made one myself so I could use the system for a Castaway story.

Alone Among the Stars isn’t the deepest or the most intricate journaling game I’ve seen, not a long shot. I also wouldn’t say it’s the best or my favorite. But the ease of play and the flexibility to play long form or short form make it a good, reliable game.

I’m warming up to try out some journaling games for November since it’s NaMoWriMo month. I’d already played The Swamp You Die In but I knew I wanted to play some Alone Among The Stars as well.

During the course of my game, I kept on rolling planets that had only one discovery on them. And so I kept on going through five or six planets. 

Then the site had a hiccup and erased everything I had written. 

I’ve made it a point to save all my journaling games but destroying your records is an option in the Alone Among the Stars. So I decided that this was my time to do that.

Yes, I had to make my own Alone Among the Stars hack

 I have been looking through the various hacks of Alone Among the Stars, designed by Takuma Okada. I realized I wanted to play a hack that would let me tell a Tom Hanks in Castaway story but I couldn’t find one that fit what I wanted to play. 

So I decided to make one.

Again, I made this for my own personal enjoyment and all the hard work was done by Takuma Okada. So here it is:

Alone as a Castaway

You are a castaway, the lone survivor of a shipwreck who has washed up on the shore of a tropical island. You need to island and do what you need to to survive. This island may be your home for the rest of your life.

Look, this is a blatant hack of Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada. Not going to pretend otherwise. It follows almost the exact same rules except for one. You don’t roll for multiple cards for each scene. A Robinson Crusoe island is small enough in scope that I think one card is enough for each scene. Essentially, the island is treated like one planet in Alone Among the Stars but you can use more than six cards.

Okay. Alone as a Castaway is writing/journaling game. Each scene/journal entry, you will draw a card to determine what discovery the scene/journal entry is about and roll a die to establish how you came across that discovery. The suit of the card will establish the nature of what you have discovered and he rank will establish where the discovery was made.

While I created this with a Tom Hanks in Castaway story in mind, you can bend it however you’d like. It can be modern day or set in the 16th century. It can be extremely realistic or full of magic and fantasy. There is no wrong.

Okay, here go the rules:

Roll a die to determine how you came across the discovery.

1-2: it took a lot of work to find it

3-4: you came upon it suddenly

5-6: you were on break.

Now draw a card to get some details about what you discovered.

Diamonds - Some essential resource you need to survive, be it a natural one to the island or sometuing washed up 

Clubs -  a danger that you need to be wary of

Hearts - wildlife

Spades - a natural, breath taking  beauty

A - in the waters of the natural bay the reefs form

2 - on the beach 

3 - on the cliffs

4 - in a shallow cave 

5 - on the mountains

6 - in the grassy fields

7 - in deep caverns

8 - deep in the jungle

9 - in the swamps 

10 - by a stream

J - at the volcano

Q - in an isolated pool

K - ruins

Have fun!

Alone Among the Stars actually works

 I recently stumbled upon Alone Among the Stars and its myriad of hacks completely by accident. I’d been looking into more conventional solitaire card games. In fact, I’m still wading through all the variations and pondering the whole matter. You use a deck of cards and a die to come up with the inspiration to describe planets that you are exploring.

Alone Among the Stars is on the seriously soft end of the solitaire RPG spectrum. On the hard side, you have the tightl structure of game books that strictly restrict your choices. On the soft side, you have basically guidelines to write fiction or a meditation exercise. The solitaire version of De Profundis consists of keeping a diary of Lovecraftian horror that hopefully isn’t actually happening to you.

Alone Among the Stars Has you take the role of a solitaire explorer in outer space. For each planet you choose to explore, you role a die to see how many cards you lie down. You then use the dice and charts to give you some rough inspiration on what you find. And thus you create a journal of exploration.

Okay. The games consists of three tables that you use to create writing guidelines. That’s it. Which is probably why there have been so many hacks of it. That’s a really, really simple framework to work with.

But... Alone Among the Stars gives you just enough structure to work with that you really do have a framework to work with. And it is open enough that the replay value is just limited to your creativity and imagination. 

I honestly wasn’t sure how well it would work. Alone Among the Stars didn’t seem like much of a step beyond just telling you to go write a story, have fun. But when I actually tried it, I found it did give me enough guidance to work as a structured writing game.

I then recommended it to some friends... and they quickly began playing it as well.

I honestly think Alone Among the Stars gives enough guidance AND flexibility that it can work for a lot of people. You can spend pages on one card or just a couple sentences and both are perfectly valid. 

I didn’t think Alone Among the Stars would be good but it is.