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CARTA NAUTICA

Carta Nautica is a SoloRPG I release on Itch.io on August of 2025. It was the first tabletop game I published.

Before working on this project, my knowledge of SoloRPGs (Tabletop Roleplaying games designed to be played by a single player) was very limited. I started the development doing an investigation of this genre of games, trying different games and taking notes.

I ended up choosing Carta SRD to build my game on top of as it has specific characteristic I was looking:

  • Very specific scope: Carta works by assigning an event to each of the 52 cards of the standard french deck of playing cards. This fixed number of events helped me to keep the scope of the project thigh.
  • Made with mundane materials: Carta is played with regular playing cards and something to take notes. To that I added 6-sided dice to introduce randomness. The easy access to the material let me prototype quickier.

I wrote the first versions of the rules on a play Google Doc. I iterated the rules for a couple of months both playing the game by myself and conducting playtesting sessions with friends and family. I took the feedback from the playtesting to rewrite and reorganize the rules and also to write definitive versions of the events.

Early Spreadsheet with card ideas.
Early Spreadsheet with card ideas.
Finalized rules without formatting.
Finalized rules without formatting.
Finalized rules without formatting.
Final, published version.

Once I have a version I was happy with I formatted the document, choosing a better style for the text and adding icons and images. All the visual assets used in the project came from creative common and public domain sources, modified slightly by me to keep a unified style.

The game was written in Spanish. I hired my sister Carla (https://bsky.app/profile/skapokon.bsky.social) to do a translation of the game to English.