Storyfold Wildwoods is a solo storybook game that was on Kickstarter back in November 2024.  It promised delivery in September 2025, and it made it on time in September 2025!

This is a game with story, and a slightly weird worker placement mechanic.

Storyfold Wildwoods  presents itself as a solo game, but that’s not how we played it.  This review will be a little different than my normal reviews.

Team Solo

Even though this is a solo game, my friend Teresa was really interested in this dark themed storybook game.  So, we ended up playing Team Solo: both of us making decisions as we played as a team, pretending to be a single solo player.

I usually play solo first to learn the rules and teach my friends, but there was no need to in Storyfold Wildwoods; the games presents the rules as you play. 

There is a Rules Reference, but we only looked at it once or twice when we played.  Most of the rules are covered fairly well as the game unfurls itself.

What Is This?

This is a story game: you play a little girl and her animal companion wandering in the dark forests.

The story is dark both physically and tonally, as you are playing to stop both the physical and metaphysical darkness in the forest.

This is also kind of a worker placement game, as you decide which actions to perform. There’s a river of actions you can perform: the further down the river the actions are, the easier they are to preform.  See above as Explore is easier to activate since it’s at the start of the river.

There are dice in the game, so the actions you attempt may or may not fail.   So, this is a worker placement game where your actions “may” or “may not” succeed.

This is also a lot of game in the cards: there is a lot of story buried in the cards in enemies, and other things that come out.  See the 6 chapters above (the first, Prologue takes you through the rules).  Each Chapter of cards is a fairly hefty deck.

Experience

This is an experience of a game.  You read the story and you make decisions, and it’s heart-wrenching when your die rolls fail, as you are letting the darkness in.   It’s surprisingly depressing when you lose and end up All Alone in the Dark.  See above.

Although this is meant to be a solo game, it worked quite well as an intimate 2-Player game, where the players collectively make decisions.   It took some of the pressure off the dark theme as we decided and worked as a small group.  I suspect this COULD work as a 3-Player game, but I think that might be too much.   Teresa and I had a great time playing as Team Solo.  Er, not a great time … as we lost, and ended up Alone In the Dark … maybe better said as “we enjoyed the experience”.

Theme

I want to be 100% clear; the theme here can be too much; it’s pretty dark. I am not sure I would want a young a kid to play this by themselves (even though the main character has a little kid in the forest).  I do think that this could be a good game to play WITH a kid; that way you can explain/mitigate/explore the darkness and failure together.   Honestly, I think if theme appeals to your child, playing Storyfold Wildwoods Team Solo with your kid might be a fantastic way to explore this world and its dark themes.

Conclusion

I don’t want to say too much about this game, because there’s a lot of neat stuff to uncover, and it’s better if you just find it out yourself.  The way the game presents the rules makes it easy to learn the game as you are playing.

The theme is dark: be aware.   But the art is beautiful and the story is interesting.

The play mechanics might be a little simple, and maybe even a touch random, but this game is an experience more than a game.  It does have a real game underneath, but its the experience here that you are embracing … the game actually hits you emotionally pretty hard.

Even though this is nominally a solo game (and it would work as a solo game), I think I enjoyed it more playing it more as an intimate 2-Player experience (with shared reading and responsibility).  I think this would be a good 2-Player game to play with you and your Mom, an adult and a child, or a boyfriend and a girlfriend.  There’s something in the game that bonds you when you play; maybe facing the darkness together brings you closer together.  Even if you fail, you still have each other.

8/10.