One of my favorite recent trends in solo TTRPGs has been developers creating games that recreate small, grounded, but emotionally resonant experiences. While I adore fantasy epics or sci-fi rollercoasters, it is often these more grounded games that stick with me the most, giving me a small glimpse into someone else’s world while reawakening memories of similar experiences I hadn’t thought about in years. A Cold Tuesday in January by bittybee123 is one such game. Despite its focus on minor league football teams, it is one of the most evocative solo TTRPG games I’ve played in a long while.
In A Cold Tuesday in January, you play as a football (or soccer) fan who is traveling to watch their favorite non-league team play on a cold Tuesday evening. However, as they travel and watch the action on the pitch, they’ll find themselves witnessing the ups and downs of minor league sports and consider their own relationship with the team and the sport as a whole.
Capturing The Football Feeling In A TTRPG
The game follows a standard solo journaling TTRPG format. You start the game by shuffling a standard deck of playing cards. You then draw cards and consult the prompt table to find out what happens or what you ponder as you travel to the stadium and watch the match play out in front of you. These prompts are split into four categories, covering: things outside the football ground, things happening in the stadium, things that are happening in the stands, and things that happen in the match, meaning that as you write your journal, you’ll cover a wide variety of different topics.
A Cold Tuesday in January is mechanically very simple. Unlike similar solo journaling TTRPGs, this game doesn’t have fail or victory states; instead, it asks the player to play until they’ve exhausted all of their options. Plus, the player doesn’t have much control of the experience, as there is no way to skip a card or influence the order in which the cards leave the deck. While this may not please fans of crunchier or mechanically intense solo TTRPGs, I think this choice perfectly fits what A Cold Tuesday in January is aiming to do.
The TTRPG aims to emulate the feeling of watching a minor league football match. In real life, watching football isn’t a life-or-death scenario. Plus, while it may be fun to pretend otherwise, the fans don’t control how the action on the pitch plays out; no amount of chanting will teach your goalkeeper how to block a corner or make the opponent’s top striker suddenly forget how to kick. Thus, adding in-depth mechanics or a solid fail state would undermine the game’s naturalistic realism, removing the atmosphere that makes the game special.
In fact, this lack of mechanics accentuates A Cold Tuesday in January’s best element: its celebration of the mundane.
Less Is Often More
As someone who used to watch minor or non-league football regularly, I can confirm that, on the surface, it is dramatically dull. While the players try their best, the matches lack the glamour and excitement of the matches found in the sport’s highest rungs (mainly because the players have to make sure they finish in one piece so they can go to their day jobs the next morning).
In a similar vein, the stadiums (if you can even call them that) are far from the glorious temples of metal and glass that you see on TV. The vast majority are public sports fields that are hidden on industrial estates or lurk on far edges of town.
If you’re lucky, you may get to spend 90 minutes sitting on a bench that, thanks to years of wear and tear, is now about 90% splinters. If not, you’ll be leaning against a flimsy rope the entire match or sitting on the ground. And don’t expect gourmet catering with international cuisine. The best you can hope for is a burger van selling mystery meat patties and paper cups of lukewarm tea or Bovril hot enough to melt iron.
But that’s what makes it so fun. Non-league sports are a community effort. You’ll see the same faces each week, from the old timers who have been following the team since its early days as a recreational activity for members of the local steelworkers’ union, to the young families looking for an affordable way to expose their children to sports.
Thus, the football often becomes a backdrop, a framing device for you to hang out with these people. People who, due to being local, you’ll encounter in other parts of your life. And this communal atmosphere makes even the smallest moments thrilling, from exciting on-pitch action to the numerous things happening off the pitch.
Sure, none of these moments are Earth-shattering. But, to quote one of my favorite articles from Dinosaur Dracula:
“Adventure knows a billion forms, and many of them are mundane.”
Something that A Cold Day in January’s prompts capture perfectly, covering everything from the struggle to find parking on gameday (and the weird places you end up parking in a futile effort to be as close to the stadium as possible) to the dueling chants that erupt in the stands when the cold fans get bored of waiting for play to resume. All moments that, on their own, are nothing special. However, they come together to make the minor league experience the joyful experience it is.
A Cold Day in January is a fantastic solo TTRPG that shows how strong prompt writing can turn a game from good to great. It is also a perfect example of how less can often be more in the TTRPG space, as having a few thematically consistent mechanics that hone in on what you want to simulate is better than having ten complex mechanics that don’t fit the game’s theme.
A Cold Day in January could have tried to emulate the soccer match itself or numerous other personal events your character was experiencing while watching the football game. However, if it had done this, it wouldn’t have captured the beautiful yet mundane experience of watching non-league soccer. The ultimate testament to this success is that it caused me to wax poetic about minor league football for a solid 100 words, something that few TTRPG titles can claim to have done.
