We Are Mushrooms

A game about staying exactly where you are, which turns out to be the hard part.

You are a mushroom in a forest clearing. You do not move and you do not speak. Across the turning seasons the clearing fills and empties around you — a knight, a fox, a wandering monk — and they build small shrines, bury things they mean to return for, and pocket the coins other travellers dropped. You see all of it. You remember all of it. The game is published by Exeunt Press and comes with a crochet pattern for Cocoa the Mushroom by Ceylon Crochet printed in the back, in case watching isn't enough and you'd rather make one.

It is a solo journaling game played with a pencil and five six-sided dice. The dice decide who passes through the clearing and what they do; you decide what it means, and you write it down. The quiet cruelty of the design is that you get no say in any of it — you cannot help, warn or intervene, only witness and record — so the whole thing becomes an exercise in attention, and in letting go. It runs about one to two hours, and while it is built for one it can be played alongside others, everyone facing the same visitors and journaling them apart.

Perfect for: Anyone who has sat still in a quiet place and quietly assigned a whole life story to a stranger walking past, then never found out a single thing about whether they were right.

1 player | 1–2 hours | Solo journaling game | Requires five six-sided dice