Pinching Tarts is a caucus game of tart-stealing nonsense inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) that offers players multiple options to win. You and your friends play Wonderland creatures who infiltrate the Red Queen’s castle to steal Her Majesty’s tarts while protecting what you hold most dear-your heart.
Pinching Tarts is a GM-less game that uses 10 six-sided dice in two colors (five of each). It includes:
- standard rules, tips, and rule summaries
- character rules, characters, and character creation
- rules for Teatime, “Eat Me” cakes, and “Drink Me” potions
- optional rules to stash and eat tarts
- sample rooms in the Red Queen’s castle
- rules for antagonists including the Knave of Hearts, the Cook, and the Red King and Queen
- a recipe for fruit-a-licious mini-tarts
- …and more!
Your mission? Pinch tarts. Drink tea. Escape… With your heads tarts!
Suitable for two or more players, childlike adults and children, this tartacular game from veteran game designer Monica Valentinelli is her PocketQuest debut. Whether you play a duck, a dodo, or a dormouse it matters not, for each creature has their own talents, specialty, and heart. Gathered together, you form “les pièces de résistance,” a ragtag band of thieves who have targeted none other than the head-chopping Red Queen.
“I had a lot of fun designing ‘Pinching Tarts’ for my first PocketQuest, so much so I devised a fun origin story for the game’s development and layout,” writes Monica. “I pretended I ‘found’ this vintage game in a secondhand book store, but several pages were torn, missing, and scribbled on in crayon. So, I reconstructed the original game and now present it you as a found artifact full of sticky notes, parchment, scrap paper, etc.”
This title includes a full color and printer-friendly greyscale version. The printer-friendly version of Pinching Tarts has a full color cover, but the interior has been modified to be less art-intensive.
For more about Monica’s process designing Pinching Tarts, you can read:
- February 23, 2024 announcement
February 28, 2024 Pinching Tarts cover reveal
March 12, design essay
March 21, 2024 Creature Sheets cover reveal
April 1, 2024 Preview, Essay, and Links on FlamesRising.com
Pinching Tarts is available exclusively on DriveThruRPG.com.
Also Available on DriveThruRPG
Creature Sheets is a pay-what-you-want game aid compatible with Pinching Tarts, a Wonderland-themed PocketQuest game designed by Monica Valentinelli. The creature sheet is not form-fillable by design for two reasons: some of the fields are subject to change during gameplay, and there’s a rule in the game that gives players the ability to swap character sheets. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you use pencil to fill out the sheets.
Creature Sheets is a digital download that includes:
- creature sheet instructions
- guidance for descriptive Wonderland-appropriate traits
- sample creature sheet for a puppy
- blank, printer-friendly creature sheets
The two-page creature sheets include tracks for hearts as well as optional tracks for tarts stolen, eaten, and foes defeated.
