While TTRPGs can transport us to worlds beyond our wildest dreams, be they worlds overflowing with sci-fi tech or realms where fantasy creatures walk freely, they can also be used to recreate real-world locations and situations. While these may sound less interesting on paper, games set in reality can be powerful tools, allowing us to look at our lives from a different angle and consider how we want to handle the problems we’re facing. That ‘One’ Day is a great example of this, as this TTRPG drops players into a toxic office where merely getting through the workday is a challenge.
That One Day is an office-based solo TTRPG played with a deck of cards. At the start of the game, the player splits the deck in two, placing the numbered cards into one deck and the face cards into the other. After this, you create the character you’ll control during the TTRPG, deciding your character’s name, the company they work for, and their specific job within the office.
Coffee And Suffering
During this process, you’ll also do some world-building, creating their character’s boss (and defining what their relationship with the boss is like), and creating three colleagues who work alongside you in the office (and deciding if you’re friends or rivals).
The main game is split into eight sections, each representing one hour of the workday. At the start of each hour, you draw two cards from the work deck (the deck containing all the face cards) and use their suits to work out what type of work you’ll be doing that hour.
After this, you draw cards from the other deck until their values add up to more than the value of the work card you drew. However, this is complicated by two factors. Firstly, cards that don’t match the suit of the work card have their value halved. Secondly, only five cards can be drawn each hour.
However, two cards throw further obstacles in your way. Aces are Overtime Cards. Whenever you draw one, you are roped into working Overtime and have to work an extra hour at the end of the workday. Jokers represent something going wrong at the office. When one is drawn, you are forced to draw a previously played work card and resolve it a second time.
Once you’ve completed the hour, you grab your journal and write about what happened during that hour. After this, you repeat the process, slowly making your way through the workday. Once during your shift, before starting an hour, you may opt to take a Lunch break. During this time, your work will start to pile up, but you’ll also get a bigger chance to talk about your coworkers and boss, and how they handle the events around the office.
The game can end in one of two ways. Either you run out of effort cards before completing all your work for the workday (leading to you suffering a mental breakdown in the middle of the office) or complete your work with effort cards remaining (allowing you to go home and prepare for tomorrow).
A Game Of Painful Flashbacks
While the idea may sound like a strange idea on paper, That One Day does a great job of capturing the pain of working in a toxic office and turning it into a mechanically interesting, fun-to-play TTRPG.
A big part of this is the card-drawing mechanic, which strikes the perfect balance between luck and strategy. While you can spend a long time thinking about how best to use your effort cards to overcome the current situation (e.g., by making sure you match suits so that each effort card adds its full value), you are still limited by the five-card limit, meaning that even your best efforts are often not enough.
And this perfectly captures how powerless you feel while working in a dead-end office job. Because no matter how skilled you are or how much effort you’re willing to put in, you’re constantly at the mercy of other people and outside forces. You may arrive at your desk with a decent amount of energy, only to be hit with two nearly impossible tasks (two king cards in this case) that are basically impossible to overcome. Or, you turn up with a burning passion inside you, only to be given trivial tasks, forcing you to waste your best energy on stuff you could do in your sleep.
Plus, the Overtime cards are a delightfully painful idea. There is nothing more painful than getting within touching distance of a good ending, only to draw two or three aces in quick succession, forcing you to watch as the finish line that felt so close suddenly gets further away, giving you the feeling in your stomach that only a terrible job you hate can give.
However, one addition I would like to see is a few extra prompts. While the four different types of work are explained well and feature enough scene-setting to get players’ creative juices flowing and make each of the suits feel different, the nature of the game means you’ll read them multiple times during each play session, meaning that some players may end up repeating themselves or hitting a wall and running out of ideas of what to say in their journal. So, a few variants on each work prompt, a roll table of ideas, or some questions to consider would help keep things fresh and aid players who are new to solo-journaling games.
Similarly, I would love to see more elements that encourage players to talk about the coworkers and bosses they created during character creation. While the game does mention them in some of the work descriptions and the lunch break section, having a collection of distinct prompts would both remind players to actively bring these characters into their journaling and help inspire players who hit a wall and can’t think of anything to write.
While “this TTRPG simulates the soul-crushing feeling of working in a toxic office” may not sound like a compliment, I do mean it as one. Simulating specific experiences in a visceral and immersive way is often way harder than it sounds, so the fact that That One Day made me feel feelings I’ve not felt since my last in-office job really makes it stand out from the pack. While I would like to see the game expanded on in the future (if only to help guide players who are newer to this genre of games), if you enjoy grounded simulation TTRPGs, then That One Day should be on your radar.
