Into the Kettle

You are one person walking across a basin nobody has written down, with a blade you are not especially good with and enough rope to get out of one mistake. The job is to find out what is actually there.

Tesserae is a solo game. You play @Missing file, you talk to a Game Master who knows every rule in this book, and you tell it where you want to go. There are no other players and no party.

The board is nineteen hexes

The whole region — @Missing file — is drawn in front of you from the first moment. Nineteen hexagonal tiles: three across the top, then four, then five, then four, then three. You can see all of it before you take a step.

Six of those tiles cannot be walked on. Open water fills the northeast and a wall of standing rock closes two corners. That leaves thirteen tiles of ground, and the shape they make is the game's first puzzle: the marsh on the eastern rim touches the rest of the region at exactly one edge, so getting to it means going the long way round the south.

That is deliberate, and it is why the map is drawn the way it is. You can see the terrain, so routing is a decision you make with your eyes. Nobody narrates the shortest path to you.

What you cannot see

Terrain, yes. Contents, no.

You can see that a tile is marsh. You cannot see that something is standing in it. Creatures, springs, cairns and outcrops are invisible until you walk onto the hex — the GM will not tell you, will not hint, and will not confirm a guess.

There is exactly one way to buy that information, and you have to climb for it. See Tiles and Edges.

Nothing resets

This is the part that surprises people who came from a dungeon crawler.

Tesserae has no runs. There is no seed, no reshuffle, no fresh descent. The region keeps its state between sittings: a tile you explored is still explored, a cairn you emptied is still empty, a creature you killed is still dead, and a spring you found still runs. The map is the save file.

So the question is never "how far can I get this time." It is "what do I know about this basin, and what do I do with it."

What you do first

Pick a direction and say it. The GM handles everything else — the bookkeeping, the token on the map, what happens when you arrive.

If you want one piece of advice before you start: the entry tile is on the western edge, and the high ground north of it is worth an early visit.