An Absurd Proposal, Part 3: The Best TTRPG Ever Made Looks the Part

A Free Game That Has No Business Looking This Good

We previously established that anyone can play Tricube Tales. Now let’s talk about why anyone would want to pick it up in the first place.

Looks matter. This is true in life and it is absolutely true in tabletop RPGs. A game that looks like it was formatted in Microsoft Word and illustrated with clip art is communicating something to a potential player before they’ve read a single rule, and what it’s communicating is: maybe not tonight. First impressions in this hobby carry real weight, especially for newcomers who are already uncertain whether TTRPGs are for them. A visually appealing, professionally designed rulebook isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It signals legitimacy. It says someone cared enough to make this game feel like something worth your time.

This is where a lot of otherwise excellent rules-lite games lose people. Some, like 24XX, lean into a deliberately sparse, abstract aesthetic that feels more like a design school experiment than an invitation to play. While others, like Mörk Borg, go so far in a unique artistic direction that the visual language becomes its own barrier, cool to look at but wildly alienating to anyone who isn’t already deep in the hobby. These are not bad games. They are, in many cases, legitimately great games. But their visual design narrows their potential audience rather than opening it up, and for a hobby already struggling to be accessible, that’s a meaningful cost.

Tricube Tales does something remarkable. It looks good. Not just good-for-free, not just good-for-a-rules-lite-game, but strikingly, warmly, invitingly good. The layout is clean and mobile-optimized, designed to be read on a phone without feeling like a compromise. The colour palette is vibrant without being garish.

The illustrations by Rick Hershey and Storn Cook are varied, energetic, and fun, and they do something that great TTRPG art is supposed to do: they make you want to play. Flip through the rulebook and you’ll encounter images that span wildly different genres and tones, which establish a visual argument for the game’s range before you’ve absorbed a single mechanic.

And the cover. Luigi Castellani’s cover design for Tricube Tales is the kind of thing that makes you do a double-take when you remember what this game costs. It belongs on the shelf next to games that retail for fifty dollars. It communicates adventure, action, multiple genres, and a little bit of child-like whimsy all at once, which is exactly what Tricube Tales delivers as a game.

For newcomers to the hobby especially, these aesthetic and design choices matter more than veterans tend to appreciate. A beautiful, easy- and enjoyable-to-read rulebook is a powerful on-ramp. It makes the game feel approachable, exciting, and worth the investment of time and imagination. Tricube Tales offers that experience for free, which is either an act of extraordinary generosity or evidence that Richard Woolcock simply doesn’t know what he’s sitting on.

Either way, the rest of us benefit.

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This fool’s errand runs on coffee. If you’ve enjoyed the folly, consider buying me one!