Zine Quest 2025 is upon us – here’s what to look for

February is a peak time for game designers and gamers looking for something new. We are entering into the . For those unaware, Zine Quest/Zine Month is an event started by Kickstarter in 2019 with a focus on letting tabletop roleplaying game designers come forward to produce smaller projects in the form of zines. As part of , Kickstarter got RPG historian Jon Peterson to explain the importance of an event like this: “Zines were the primordial soup where the ideas that became RPGs bounced around, combined with each other, and eventually merged into something amazing.”

It is a special time when significant numbers of indie tabletop game designers come forth with small, unique games to be funded on Kickstarter. Size is the main focus of these games, everything about them leans towards the smaller end. Some projects are only the size of a small booklet; others might be the size of a small book. The funding goals are usually smaller and easier to hit, and the length of the funding campaign is often only ✃a week or so. Many designers use it as a chance to familiarize themselves with the crowdfunding systems, but others use it as an opportunity to create something more efficient than a big RPG book.

What you get out of these are condensed creativity out of designers and artists. You’ll find the full range of projects, from full complete games for you and your group to adventures that you can run in an ongoing campaign. It’s an invaluable part of the indie scene, a way for designers to produce something that might not see easily see a table otherwise.

If you , you will find a massive amount of projects, with such variety that there’s certainly something for you. You’ll similarly find designers advertising their projects in Zine Month or Zine Quest hashtags on any social media you prefer. It is an absolutely incredible time to be on the hunt for new games. There are too many projects to list easily, but here’s a couple that have caught my attention.

Inspired by This Is How You Lose The Time War, this game sees a grand battle for the fate of all time and space between two sides. If one side wins, the other will basically cease to exist. Two players take on the role of evenly matched, elite agents fighting to bring victory for their side. However, since you’re evenly matched, you’re staring down the barrel of the only person who understands you.

Prequel is the end of a campaign, but the start of your campaign. In this game, your party have reached the end of th♛eir campaign and are about to engage in their battle against the final boss. During the fight, you will fill in the the blanks of every hurdle your group surpassed to get here, only to fall. That failure, though, sets up the final boss to be defeated by other heroes, the heroes who you and your party will play in a longer campaign.

There are worldbuilding roleplaying games that you can play. This game, about playing the last surviving people in a space ship, is literally about world bu🐬ilding. This planet planet-building game is about exploring the galaxy, creating worlds with your table, and finding somewhere toꦗ call home.

Here’s an adventure to drop headlong into a campaign. Two towers with improbably architecture appear out of no where. A damaging aura spreads outwards from these towers the longer they go unexplored. Navigate up these strange puzzle towers and solve the mystery at their heart before it’s simply too late.

Another two player game set in the golden age of science fiction. One player takes the role of the universe’s great hero; the other becomes that hero’s greatest nemesis. Together, the two of you construct their climactic, final duel to the death.

Your party are actors filming the pilot episode of your sitcom in the🌼 1950s. When something goes terribly wrong, you find yourselves trapped in the sitcom made reality. The cast has to find a way out as the audience oos and ahs at them, with the threat of the episode resetting at any mom💟ent. This game even plans to fund a soundtrack indicating the start and end of each loop.

There are plenty of other projects that you can find, over a hundred currently listed, with more certain to come. If you’re interested in getting involved with Zine Quest as a designer, it’s pretty easy. Whether you’re on the hunt for something new, or you don’t want to teach your table a massive new book, there are many zines right over the horizon ready to invigorate your gaming.