The Casserole Dish

This is a game about witnessing moments across the lifespan of a family. You are a casserole dish. You’ve been in this family for a long time. Every get-together or celebration, you’ve been there. You will describe the dishes that were served, the people who came together to eat them, and the occasions for those gatherings. This will tell the story of a family. You are an inanimate object, and your observations are neutral.

The Casserole Dish is a solo journaling game. To play, you'll need a six-sided die (a d6) and a journaling method to write/record your observations.

I've been wanting to write this game for months, ever since I discovered Maggie Mahoney's Simple Series, a collection of solo journaling games in which the player inhabits inanimate objects to observe and record the world around them. They are elegant, uncomplicated, and deeply evocative games. The first time I played one (the brilliant Simple Plots), it revealed a message so prescient to my life at the time that it hit me like a punch to the stomach: that contemplative inactivity is not passivity, but instead a (often necessary) facilitator of growth.

The Casserole Dish is a tribute to those games (and you should definitely check them out first). I hope it brings joy.