Koriko is a solo journaling game by Jack Harrison in which a teenage witch spends a year in a city she has never seen. You play it across six volumes with the book, a tarot deck, a stack of dice and a notebook you keep yourself. Keeping that notebook well is what makes the year worth finishing.
Most players stall on the notebook. A Koriko year is six sittings of an hour or two each, and a pile of loose entries in a lined pad does not feel like a year when you reach the end of it.
Below are five ways to lay the book out so it holds the shape of the story. None of them change a rule. They are page decisions, made once, before the first card comes off the deck.
Table of Contents
What Koriko actually asks you to do
Koriko: A Magical Year is by Jack Harrison, with cover and interior art by Deb JJ Lee, published through Mousehole Press in 2023 after a Kickstarter that raised £235,791. Its stated inspiration is Kiki’s Delivery Service, the Studio Ghibli film and the Eiko Kadono novel it came from. It took two Silver ENNIEs in 2024, for cover art and for production values.
To play you need the book, a tarot deck, a stack of six-sided dice and a journal. The story runs across six sections the game calls volumes, each an hour or two. Volume one is Departure and volume two is Arrival, so the pacing is built in before you make any decisions of your own.
Setup builds your witch and her home village first, then the city. Koriko is a place of your invention, and the book asks you questions until it exists: a seaside town, a smoggy capital, whatever you answer with. Then she arrives, and you start drawing cards.
The minor arcana give you moments. The major arcana give you confidants, twenty-two of them, who accumulate into a separate deck the game calls your circle. Each confidant carries prompts to use whenever they come up, and after four meetings you reach a crossroads with that person where you either help them, at some risk, or turn them down.
Risk is where the dice come in. Take a chance and you add dice to a stack that gets less stable every time you touch it. When it falls, the fallen dice tell you what the consequence is, and one of those consequences is a Lesson: something your witch has learned, written into the journal, spendable later.
At the end of every volume she rests and writes a letter home to her mentor. At the close of winter she decides whether to stay in Koriko as the city’s witch or go. If you want the fuller picture before you buy, Destructoid’s write-up walks through a season of play in detail.
1. Map the city before you play in it
Setup asks you to invent Koriko and then never gives you anywhere to put it. Most Koriko players answer the questions on scrap paper and lose them by volume three, at which point the harbour has moved and the baker lives on a different street.
Give the city the first opening in the book. Left page: a rough map of the shapes you decided on, as crude as you like. Right page: the answers you gave during setup, written as short lines rather than paragraphs.
Use a paper background with some age in it so the map reads as a document rather than a doodle. A single sheet of patterned paper trimmed to the page, with the map inked straight onto it, does more for the finished book than any amount of neat handwriting. This is the spread you will flip back to more than any other.
If you have never assembled a page this way, the basics in our beginner’s guide to junk journals cover the layering using things you probably already own.
2. Give the circle its own ledger
The circle is the mechanic that makes Koriko a year rather than a series of scenes, and it is the one most easily lost. Twenty-two possible confidants, each met up to four times, each heading towards a crossroads you will want to remember the run-up to.
Set aside four consecutive pages near the front for a confidant ledger. Rule each page into quarters, one confidant per box, with the card name in the corner and room for four dated lines underneath. Every time that person surfaces, add one line before you write the entry proper.
The ledger is a two-minute habit that pays off around volume four, when you draw someone for the third time and cannot recall what they wanted. It also gives the finished book a reference section you can flip back to.
Tuck a small envelope or a folded pocket onto the last ledger page. Anything you make for one particular confidant lives in there rather than floating loose in the book.
3. Mark each season so the year reads as a year
A Koriko journal covers twelve months and six volumes, and without a marker the whole thing reads as one long undated block. The fix is a divider between volumes, and it does not need to be elaborate.
One page, the season’s name, and one colour that runs through everything on that side of the divider. Spring gets cool greens, summer goes warmer, autumn drops to rust, winter goes pale. Pick the papers before you play, so the choice never interrupts a session.
The tab is the other half of this. A cut-and-glued tab on the divider page, sticking out past the fore-edge, lets you find spring in a closed book without opening it. Anyone arriving at Koriko from an RPJ background does this without being told, because that is how a junk journal gets built anyway.
Print the season papers in one go before volume one and store them in the back pocket. Printing junk journal papers at home takes five settings, and doing all four seasons at once means you never stop mid-volume to feed the printer.
4. Keep the letters home as letters
The letter to the mentor at the end of each volume is the strongest piece of writing the game asks for, and writing it as another journal entry wastes it. It is addressed to someone. Make it look addressed to someone.
Write each letter on a separate sheet, fold it, and glue a pocket or a simple envelope onto the volume’s closing page. The letter goes in the pocket, readable, removable. Six letters across the Koriko year, six pockets, and the book acquires a rhythm that has nothing to do with how well you write.
Date them in the witch’s calendar rather than yours. It costs nothing and it stops the letters reading like diary entries from a person sitting at a kitchen table in 2026.
5. Leave the last spread of your Koriko journal empty until winter
Koriko ends with a real decision. She stays as the city’s resident witch or she leaves, back to the village or somewhere new, and the game does not make that choice for you.
Reserve the final opening of your Koriko journal on day one and rule it off. The temptation to use it turns up in volume five, when you run short of space. Knowing the ending has a page waiting changes how you pace the middle of the book.
When you get there, the left page takes the decision itself and the right takes what came after. That second page is the only part of a Koriko journal that answers the question the whole year has been asking.
Watch someone else keep a Koriko journal first
Reading rules is a poor way to work out how a book should look. Two videos are worth the time before you start.
The Bad Spot’s review is the clearest walk-through of the dice stack and the circle I have found, and at sixty thousand views it is why a fair few people bought the game at all. Watch this one if you are still deciding whether to buy Koriko.
For the journal side, Bookish Artist Mandy’s first Koriko episode shows the actual page as she fills it, pens and all. Watch what she does with margins and you will steal something useful.
Koriko questions people actually ask
I have bought Koriko and still have not started. What do I do first?
Open the book at setup and answer its questions before you touch a card. Setup builds your witch and her home village, then hands you the city to invent; write those answers onto the first opening of the journal as a map and a list and you have started. The bought-but-unstarted pile is mostly people waiting for a tidier moment.
Do I need dice to play Koriko, or can I use cards instead?
You need both a tarot deck and dice. The cards carry the prompts and the dice carry the risk, and the dice do something cards cannot: you stack them into a tower that eventually falls over. Swap in cards and you lose the part of the game that makes taking a chance feel like taking one.
Do I have to be any good at writing?
No. Every card you draw arrives attached to a prompt, so you are answering something rather than staring at an empty page. Plenty of players write two lines and spend the rest of the evening on the page itself, gluing paper and cutting tabs, and nobody reads it but you.
How long does one Koriko session take?
An hour or two. The story runs across six volumes and the publisher puts each volume at one to two hours, so a full year of play is about six evenings. You can leave months between them, which is when the letter home gets written anyway.
Do I need to have played a roleplaying game before?
No, and the book says as much: a passing familiarity with witches, city life and teenage drama is the only background it asks for. There is no group to coordinate and nobody to perform in front of. A good share of the people arriving at Koriko now came out of junk journalling rather than tabletop gaming.
Can I play Koriko in a junk journal instead of a plain notebook?
Yes, and the length suits it. Six volumes across a year is enough book for tabs, pockets, season dividers and a map spread to earn their place. A bound junk journal also takes the letters home better than a notebook, because you can glue a pocket onto a page without the spine fighting you.
What a finished Koriko journal looks like
Twelve to twenty openings in a finished Koriko journal, depending on how much you write. A map at the front, a ledger behind it, four tabbed dividers, six letters in six pockets, and a decision at the back. That is a book you can hand to somebody.
The wider RPJ crowd has been arriving at the same structure from the other direction, coming to solo games out of junk journalling rather than out of tabletop roleplaying. If you are newer to the format, our guide to solo journaling RPGs covers what these games are, and the first seven nights walkthrough covers the habit of actually sitting down to play.
Koriko rewards the book you build for it. Six volumes is enough time for a badly organised journal to become a chore and a well laid-out one to become the reason you keep going.
If you would rather have the season papers and pocket pieces already designed than go hunting for them, Helene puts together the Folklore Forest kit for exactly this kind of year-long book.