Turo-Turo
A downloadable game
You are the owner of the last karinderya in the world, a quiet little restaurant lit by tungsten lights and filled with cheap monoblock chairs and plastic tables. Once, your corner was filled to the brim with noise and life, with butchers hacking away at pig jowls and vegetable salesmen elbowing each other to show off their greenest ampalaya. Tricycles ambled their way down the street as the tell-tale slapping of tsinelas hit the street, while the children played basketball in jerry-rigged hoops. Now? Now you live in a future of neon colors and pill intakes.
This is a game for one player in which you use a deck of cards, a set of writing implements, and your own thoughts to ruminate on the experience of selling real food to real people in an artificial city. Cards will be split into four suits, each assisting you in telling your story.
Mechanical inspiration taken from The Adventurer by James Chip.
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Community Copy
For those who would like to play but are unwilling or unable to pay for a copy. For every dollar spent on the game or rating given I will add another copy! I also add copies as and when I feel up to it.
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Thank you for the community copies!!! I just skimmed through and this looks amazing. So happy with the food options presented. The setting is very cool, but the way the story works around the characters feels like Midnight Diner...my favorite Netflix show! I'm very excited to try it out. I can't believe I found such a gem! Thank you for making this!
no, thank YOU for being interested in my game!!
Turo-Turo is a solo journaling game about being the last karinderya restaurant in a sterile, corporate, cyberpunk future. Think of it as a warmer, tabletop VA11 Hall-A.
The PDF is 11 pages, with an absolutely iconic cover and easy-to-read, well-organized text throughout.
If you're not familiar with karinderyas (also sometimes spelled karenderya or carinderia), they're small street-food style restaurants. The game feels like it wants you to have a little knowledge of them going in, or to look it up, but it provides a menu and gives enough context to get a good mental picture. You can also adapt the game engine to a street food culture you're more familiar with, such as a kebab shop or a takoyaki cart, without doing more than changing the menu.
Mechanically, you play Turo-Turo by drawing cards from a deck. The cards take the form of events and customers, as well as foods and customer behaviors. When the events deck runs out, the game ends.
Turo-Turo's writing is its strongest suit, and it has a very strong sense of place and atmosphere. The prompts corresponding to the cards are all engaging, and there's a sort of comfortable, wry humor to them as well. A lot of the events emphasize scarcity and alienation, but the people, foods, and behaviors are a strong counterbalance to that.
Overall, if you want a game that'll make you think and feel, you should pick up this one. It's simple, to the point, doesn't ask a lot of you, but has a lot to show. I love this style of cyberpunk.