Caveat Emptor - Starter guide
What is Caveat Emptor?
Wittenberg, 1541. The Manager has left on business for three days, and the shop is yours. Caveat Emptor is a solo journaling game in which you play an Assistant Demon behind the counter of a small shop that sells things people should not want. A customer walks in, you show them something that looks too good to be true, and while they admire it you twist a curse into it. Then you close the sale, smile, and never let on what you are.
The trick is that you are not very good at your job. Your Manager has put you on a perdition improvement plan, and there is a sales quota to hit before he returns. Miss it and you face annihilation, which in this line of work is what a bad performance review looks like. So you sell, and you keep selling, and you keep a ledger of every item that leaves the shop, who bought it and what happened next.
Caveat Emptor was designed and published by Exeunt Press, the studio behind the ENNIE-nominated Exclusion Zone Botanist and the design newsletter Skeleton Code Machine. It began in 2024 as a free one-page trifold, and the Expanded Edition followed the same year, first digitally and then in print. Netherbook sells that Expanded Edition: a 36-page A5 zine with the extra rules, more items and more customers.
How does the system work?
You need the zine, a standard deck of playing cards, three six-sided dice and something to write in. The cards run the shop: they decide who walks through the door and what you have on the shelf to tempt them with. The dice decide whether the sale holds. You describe the customer, choose the item, pick your curse, roll, and write down what happened. Every sale is one entry in your ledger; a full day is a page.
The heart of the game is the curse itself. Curses come in three categories, and every time you reuse one, your customers grow more suspicious and the roll gets harder. You can close the shop for the day to reset those odds, but you only have three days and a quota to meet, so every early closing is a bet against yourself. That is the whole tension in one rule: the curse you know works is the curse most likely to give you away.
The Expanded Edition adds Vexation Points, a running measure of how badly the day is going, along with new victory conditions and a random item generator for when your inventory runs dry. Twenty-six items come in the book, each waiting for a curse and a buyer.
A full playthrough takes about an hour. That is short for a journaling game, and deliberately so: the point is a brisk, wicked day of trade, not a life story.
What do you need to start?
The zine is the game. Add a deck of cards, three d6 and a notebook or a few printed ledger pages, and you are open for business. Exeunt Press also provides printable trackers and tokens for the curse categories, but three coins on the table do the same job.
The book is in English. It is a light read, well laid out, and the rules come with worked examples, so you can be selling within fifteen minutes of opening it.
Who is this game for?
Caveat Emptor is for solo players who like their horror with a dry smile. If you enjoyed Needful Things or The Screwtape Letters, the two books the designer names as inspiration, you already know the tone: polite, transactional evil, delivered with a straight face. It is also a wonderful first journaling game, because the structure carries you. You never stare at a blank page; there is always a customer at the door.
Game masters should look twice as well. Every session produces a dozen cursed items with an owner and a consequence attached. Drop the shop into any fantasy town and you have a merchant your players will never quite trust, a stock of loot with strings attached and a handful of NPCs who have already made a terrible mistake. And anyone who has ever worked retail will recognise the quota.
It is not for you if you want a long campaign or a character who grows. The demon does not change; only the ledger fills. It is also a game about tricking people who deserve a little better, so if you want your protagonist to be likeable, choose something else.
How does it compare to other systems?
Compared to Dungeons & Dragons 5e there is no table, no game master and no party. Caveat Emptor asks an hour of your own time, a pen and a willingness to be the villain of a very small story.
Compared to Thousand Year Old Vampire, the solo journaling game most people know, it is the quick one. Thousand Year Old Vampire stretches across centuries and asks you to watch memories fade; Caveat Emptor gives you three days and asks you to make quota. One is a novel, the other is a short story with a body count.
Compared to Tollund, the other Exeunt Press game on our shelves, it is the light one. Both run on a deck of cards and a countdown of days, but Tollund is a grave, tender game about a chosen sacrifice in Iron Age Denmark, while Caveat Emptor is about selling a man a mirror that will ruin him. Play both and you can see the same designer working the same tools in opposite moods.
Where do you start?
Read the zine cover to cover before you play; at 36 pages it is a short evening. Then set up the shop, draw your first customer and resist the urge to plan the perfect curse. The game is better when you commit quickly and let the ledger record the fallout.
Two pieces of advice. Write short: a line for the customer, a line for the item, a line for what went wrong. And spread your curses across the three categories from the very first sale, because the temptation to repeat the one that worked is exactly what the game is built to punish.
Recommended products at Netherbook
Caveat Emptor - A Solo Journaling RPG is the complete game in one zine.
If the solo journaling format is what you enjoy, Tollund from the same designer is the natural next step, deeper and darker, and Thousand Year Old Vampire is the long-form classic of the genre. Our Solo & Journaling collection gathers every game in the shop you can play on your own, and if it is the dark humour that hooked you, the Comedy & Satire collection has more games that refuse to take their villains seriously.