A Perfect Rock vs Microscope - which worldbuilding game fits your table?

The short answer

Pick A Perfect Rock if you want a warm, hopeful game about exploration: one ship, the last of your people, and a handful of real rocks on the table that become the planets you visit, one layer at a time, until you find one worth calling home. Pick Microscope if you want to build something vast: the entire history of a world, an empire or a galaxy, from its founding to its fall, jumping across centuries with nothing but index cards and the imagination of your group. One game is a journey. The other is a timeline.

What these two games have in common

Both are worldbuilding games without a game master. Nobody prepares anything and nobody runs the table; the rules pass creative authority around the group, and the world that ends up in front of you belongs to everyone equally. Both need almost nothing beyond the book: paper, pencils, and either a few dice or a stack of index cards. Both are story games rather than adventure games, so there are no character sheets full of numbers, no combat rounds and no winning.

And both leave something behind. When the evening is over, you have a galaxy of named planets or a history spanning centuries, and either one can seed a campaign in a completely different game, or simply live in a notebook as a thing you made together. That is a rarer quality than it sounds. Most roleplaying games evaporate when the session ends; these two leave a map.

Where they really differ

Scale. A Perfect Rock zooms in. You are a crew on a ship, you visit one planet at a time, and every planet gets your full attention: its sky, its weather, its surface, what grows and lives there, and the secret it keeps underneath. Microscope zooms out. You are not characters but historians, working at the level of eras. A single sentence on an index card can cover three hundred years, and the game is happiest when you jump from the founding of a city straight to its ruins.

The engine. In A Perfect Rock every star has its own page in the book. You pick a rock, and prompts and six-sided dice uncover the planet layer by layer, using what the rock actually looks like as inspiration: a streak of quartz becomes a frozen river, a rough underside becomes caves. Then the crew talks it over: do we settle here, or push on? Between stars you spend downtime aboard the ship, getting to know your fellow explorers and the home you lost. Microscope starts with bookends, the beginning and the end of the history, and a palette, a yes-and-no list of what belongs in this world. From there you take turns adding periods, events and scenes anywhere on the timeline. A rotating focus steers each round, scenes are played out to answer a single question, and every card is marked light or dark. The one hard rule: nothing may contradict what is already on the table.

Tone. A Perfect Rock is cosy on purpose. Discovery matters more than danger, the mood is hope rather than dread, and the game is gentle enough that reviewers have used it to introduce children to roleplaying. Microscope has no mood of its own. It becomes whatever the palette allows, and left to themselves, histories tend toward rises and falls, wars, plagues and collapses. The light and dark markers are the only steering wheel, and the game will happily let you build something bleak.

Randomness. A Perfect Rock leans on dice and tables, and the biggest random element is the rock in your hand. You never fully choose what a planet will be; you find out. Microscope has no dice at all. Every period, event and scene is a deliberate choice, which some players find liberating and others find paralysing: the blank index card can stare back. Microscope is the better game for people who like to decide, A Perfect Rock for people who like to discover.

Ending and size of the group. A Perfect Rock ends when your people choose a home, and a full journey takes two to five hours. It plays with one to four people and includes guidance for solo and duet play. Microscope plays with two to four and ends whenever you decide it does; a history can be finished in an afternoon or revisited for months. It is not designed for solo play, and it does want players who talk.

What it feels like at the table

An evening with A Perfect Rock: someone puts a grey pebble from the beach in the middle of the table and the ship drops out of orbit above it. The dice say the sky is violet and the surface is mostly ocean; the white band around the pebble becomes a ring of islands. You describe walking on it. Someone else finds the fauna: slow, luminous things that graze in the shallows. Then the roll for the secret comes up, and the islands turn out to be the backs of something sleeping. The crew talks it over. It is beautiful, and it is not safe, and you push on. Back on the ship, someone remembers the smell of rain on the homeworld, and the rest of the table goes quiet for a moment.

An evening with Microscope: the bookends read "the first ship reaches the new world" and "the last city goes dark". One player puts down a period called The Long Peace and marks it light. The next player, who does not trust peace, adds an event inside it: the census that discovers the population has been shrinking for a century. The focus this round is "the family that keeps the archives", so the third player calls a scene, two hundred years earlier, in which an archivist decides which records to burn. You play it to answer one question: what did she save? The answer goes on a card, and suddenly the whole history has a shape it did not have five minutes ago.

What you actually need to buy

For A Perfect Rock you need the book (EUR 27,95): a 64-page A5 softcover with the rules, the star pages, the planet tables and the solo, duet and group guidance. Add a few six-sided dice, pencils, paper and your own rocks. The book includes illustrated rocks if you have none, but half the charm is picking them up on a walk.

For Microscope you need the book (EUR 29,95) and a stack of index cards. That is all. No dice, no screen, no miniatures. Pencils and a large table help, because a good history will spread.

Neither game has expansions you need. Both are complete in one book.

Choose A Perfect Rock if ... Choose Microscope if ...

Choose A Perfect Rock if you want warmth: a game about finding a home, not losing one. Choose it if you want to play alone or with one other person, because it supports both properly. Choose it if you like dice and tables doing part of the imagining for you, and if you want something you could play with a ten-year-old and still enjoy yourself. Choose it if two to five hours with a clear ending is the shape your evenings take.

Choose Microscope if you want scale: centuries, empires, the long arc of a civilisation. Choose it if you are planning a campaign and want a setting with real history behind it, built by the same people who will play in it. Choose it if your group likes to talk, argue and build on each other's ideas without dice getting in the way. And choose it if you enjoy tragedy as much as hope, because a history that only goes up is rarely interesting.

If what you actually want is a community on a map, growing season by season and threatened from outside, look at The Quiet Year instead. It sits between these two in scale and mood, and it is the better choice for groups who want a place rather than a journey or a timeline.

Where to start at Netherbook

A Perfect Rock (EUR 27,95) is new in the shop and ready to play the evening it arrives: bring dice and go find some rocks. Microscope (EUR 29,95) is a modern classic; if you want to know why it changed the way people think about worldbuilding games, our history chapter on the ages of Microscope tells that story. Both games live in our Worldbuilding collection, alongside the The Quiet Year box set. A Perfect Rock is also at home in Solo & Journaling, if you would rather take the journey on your own.