The Thesis

There is a particular kind of game that asks you to sit alone at a table with a deck of cards, a journal, and a tower of blocks, and tell yourself a story about someone who is going to die. That kind of game didn’t exist — not in this form, not as a recognizable genre — until Chris Bissette made The Wretched in 2020 and then gave its engine away for free.

Bissette is a British designer based in Manchester, with a background in creative writing and a thirty-year history of playing tabletop RPGs. They came to game design late, after years of trying to break into fiction writing. The breakthrough arrived not through a novel but through a game about the last surviving crew member of a salvage ship, played solo with a tumbling block tower that collapses when your luck runs out. The Wretched landed on Tabletop Gaming Magazine’s Best Games of 2020 list and on Shut Up & Sit Down’s radar. More importantly, its engine landed in the hands of every indie designer who wanted to build something like it.

The Wretched & Alone SRD — a free, open system reference document — spawned over 150 licensed games across horror, science fiction, fantasy, and experimental genres. Bissette didn’t just design a game. They designed a platform, then opened the doors and let the community move in. The result is one of the most prolific design ecosystems in indie RPG history, all flowing from a single engine built by one person sitting alone with a deck of cards and a question: what does it feel like to know you’re the last one left?

Invention — 6: “Smart Combination”

The Wretched combined a deck of cards, a tumbling block tower, and a journaling prompt system into a solo RPG engine that genuinely felt new. Card-based prompts existed. Block towers existed — Dread had already proved that Jenga could generate horror. Solo journaling existed. But Bissette fused these elements into a cohesive engine where the physical tension of the tower mirrored the narrative tension of the prompts, and the randomness of the card draw shaped the story organically. Four suits mapped to four thematic categories. The tower collapsed when your luck ran out. The journal recorded a story that only you would ever read.

The proof of the invention’s power isn’t critical acclaim — it’s adoption. Over 150 licensed games built on the Wretched & Alone engine, across wildly different genres and tones. That’s not influence; that’s infrastructure. Not a 7 because each individual component predated The Wretched, and the innovation is combinatorial rather than categorical. Not a 5 because 150-plus derivative games proves the engine had real generative power that no previous solo RPG system had demonstrated at that scale.

Architecture — 5: “Gets the Job Done Well”

The Wretched & Alone architecture is elegant in its minimalism: four suits mapped to four thematic categories, a block tower as escalating tension, a journal as the play surface, and a simple resolution mechanic that determines whether you survive another day. The system is robust enough that 150-plus designers built on it across wildly different genres — horror, romance, science fiction, historical, experimental — without the architecture breaking.

Blood In The Margins, Bissette’s most recent major work, shows architectural evolution — replacing the block tower with tension mechanics to address replayability concerns, adding structured prompts to solve the “irrelevant prompt” problem that emerged from community feedback. A Dungeon Game demonstrates Bissette can build in other registers entirely, with a light three-stat OSR system that decouples advancement from combat. Not a 6 because the solo journaling format inherently limits architectural depth — there’s no multi-player interaction, no emergent social dynamics, no opponent to pressure-test the structure. Not a 4 because the system’s adaptability across 150-plus derivative games proves genuine architectural soundness.

Mastery — 4: “Developing Voice”

Five to six years of active design, with a clear artistic identity: intimate solo experiences, specificity over looseness, constraint as creative fuel. Bissette describes solo game design as “leaving notes for strangers to find, never knowing what stories they might tell in response” — a philosophy that shapes everything from the Wretched’s card prompts to Blood In The Margins’ structured narrative triggers.

The freelance trajectory adds credibility: writing credits on Pathfinder 2, Fallout, Hunter: The Reckoning, Mork Borg, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and the upcoming Discworld RPG content and Tunnels & Trolls 2025 edition. ENnie-nominated blog. Best Games of 2020 placement. The design voice is distinctive and the professional recognition is growing. Not a 5 because the career is still young and the catalog of original designs — as opposed to freelance writing for other systems — is modest in scope. Not a 3 because the critical recognition, the 150-plus game ecosystem, and the professional freelance trajectory demonstrate impact well beyond an emerging designer.

The Legacy

The most generous thing a designer can do is build an engine and give it away. Chris Bissette built the Wretched & Alone engine — a system for solo journaling games that fuses card prompts, physical tension, and intimate narrative into something that feels like writing a novel you can’t control — and then released the SRD for free. Over 150 designers took that gift and built games with it. Horror games. Love stories. Historical dramas. Experimental art pieces. An entire ecosystem of solo play, all flowing from one engine designed by one person in Manchester.

The career is five years old. The score reflects the youth, not the ceiling. Bissette’s design voice — intimate, specific, generous, haunted — is already distinctive enough to recognize across titles. The freelance credits are stacking up. Blood In The Margins shows real architectural evolution. The trajectory is steep and the foundation is solid.

The Soloist built an engine for loneliness and discovered that loneliness, shared as a system, becomes something closer to connection. That’s not a bad philosophy to build a career on.

Total: 16 points. Year: 2020.

FINAL SCORE: Invention 6 + Architecture 5 + Mastery 4 + Adjustments 1 = 16/41 (2020)

The Soloist built an engine for loneliness and discovered that loneliness, shared as a system, becomes something closer to connection.