Create Your Own Puzzles and Stories with Rillem

By Cameron Kunzelman | October 9, 2025 | 11:00am

Tabletop Features rillem

Create Your Own Puzzles and Stories with Rillem

There’s a lot of love in the world for the storytelling stylings of Elden Ring and its evocative, sketchy world, but I gotta tell you, there was a time when we just had Myst. Go to an island, click around it, read some journals that sort of explain what’s happening, and talk to a guy about killing his sons. That was a solid day’s work in the 1990s, and when the sequel Riven came out, we were all ready to do it again. Not one island, this time, but several. Not just a few puzzles but approximately one million. For the most part, these pleasures of puzzle worlds live in the realm of digital games—Blue Prince, The Witness, and everything in between. But now there’s a solo tabletop game you can play called Rillem that can give you some of that thrill.

Rillem is a relatively simple experience. You take a deck of cards, and from it you make a puzzle world. Based in broad strokes on the plot structure of Riven, the world you build is on the edge of extinction—it will soon fall into the void. There’s a prisoner there that you need to rescue, or maybe an enemy you must subdue, and there’s tasks for you to do along the way. The operation of the game is about taking a deck of cards, laying it out in a particular shape, and narratively working your way through it to accomplish the goal of liberation and then escape. It’s like if you told a story about playing Riven without actually playing it. This is perhaps an acquired taste.

Most Popular

Beat by beat, the game is about creating an island where a puzzle game might happen. Each turn of the game has you turning over a card, reading a prompt, and then writing and drawing something to respond to the prompt. Some of the prompts that you might draw are merely evocative, and they ask you to draw specific things in order to force you into developing your own aesthetic for the island. “A geometric shape carved from wood is suspended from a large tree branch” asks you to both write something about that encounter and to render that scene into a notebook. What is the shape? What does the tree look like? How does it fit into the landscape? Playing Rillem is almost about turning into a natural observer, determining the visual and other facts of the world in the act of writing them down.

There are other prompts that are about creating puzzles for yourself, and this is what makes Rillem unique in my mind. You use the deck of cards to create islands, and those islands are made up of seven cards. Within those cards, you are looking for diamonds (which are obstacles) and spades (which are openers, which solve obstacles). Using the randomness of a deck of cards, you’re creating topography and relationships between different parts of the islands, using the game rules to generate your own version of these adventure games. You’re prompting yourself with thoughts about how to design interesting visual and narrative relationships in the same way that a designer of a point and click adventure game might; you are simply liberated from having to make good puzzles, instead replacing them with interesting attachments between two different cards. Do this enough times and you can release the prisoner and escape the island with them—the good old fashioned heroic quest.

There’s more mechanical crunch to the game, including a system of days and hours to constrain actions, some fast traveling, and setting up relations between the islands. The game is also bunny themed in a way that I did not find delightful and wish were different. These are all interesting, but to me they are secondary to the game’s big reach, which is asking you to play and design at the same time. You make the world, and you draw it. You make the world, and you design how its parts fit together with each other.

Solo tabletop games, and journaling games especially, sometimes can have a “so what” feeling to them. I have played a lot of them for this column, and not all of the ones I play get written about, often because they can feel thin and like I am doing all the work rather than the game system carrying its weight. Rillem approaches the solo game space from a wholly different direction, making the juice of the game not the artifact like a journal or the character you develop to play with, but instead what you have managed to relate together into a network of designed and coordinated things. You play the game to make a knot, and then you unravel it by matching cards together and writing solutions to the puzzles you’ve spun into reality. It’s a truly wild thing, and I recommend giving it a chance.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.