The Tiniest Tea Shop by SodaTree

Here is a cozy little game from itch.io.  In The Tiniest Tea Shop (by SodaTree), you have a character with a shop, with a range of supplies, trying to give customers what they want.  This is all tied together by two short lists of 6 things each: the Emotions and Trials that we all go through.  I will be calling these Aspects.

So, your shop owner has their own Emotion and Trial, the customers all have an Emotion and Trial, and the tea ingredients each relieve one Emotion or Trial.  The game itself is a simple but clever way to tie these all Aspects together with just a few d6 rolls.  The matching of Aspects has an effect on die rolls.

The early version was a one-page game in the 1100 Word TTRPG Kitchen Jam, and that version works perfectly well.  In mid-2026, they added an expanded version with full-color art (so much pink), mostly the same rules but easier on the eyes, with a few additions.

The itch.io page is here.

Each day you get a magical delivery of herbs which each soothe one Emotion and one Trial.  Then you get a customer.  Compare your Aspects to theirs and roll to see if you connect.  Then look at your stock of ingredients and see if you have anything in stock to relieve their Emotion or Trial.  If the Aspects align, the customer will provide a review, and each two reviews counts as one star.  You start with one star, you get one customer per day for each star you have, and the author says that if you get five stars, you can sell your shop and retire, and the game will end quietly.  

Sure.

It feels like maybe the game exists in the real world, as all the short sample customers sound like modern-day characters.  But fairies deliver the ingredients, so maybe it's an outpost in a fantasy world?  See my notes about add-ons below.

Here is the sheet we used to track our little tea shop:

I added an area for inventory, organized by Emotion/Trial.  Then for each customer I listed their Aspects, their Connection roll, their Tea roll, and whether they left a review.  Since you start the game with no inventory, the first customers are all fails.  Anne rolled the dice as needed, and I kept the notes.  We had some roleplay moments, though that's not really her thing, and I am always more into the dice mechanics than the social stuff.

This felt like it could be an ongoing campaign.  Maybe next weekend we will run a few more customers.  If we opened a new shop, would we really stop running the old one?  Or does it make more sense to hire a few more characters and add more tables for customers.  If there were a few characters on staff, each with different Aspects, they could work together to connect with the customers.

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Add-Ons?

There are two actual add-ons that I know of.  

Add-on #1: 
SodaTree added a Character Deck using a deck of cards to generate customers for you.  

In this expansion, the author did a very thorough job with the detailed characters for the face cards, but for the regular cards, it was odd seeing no actual character description or traits.

Add-on #2: 
Stray Pets by cozycitrine

This one adds a set of 8 possible "pets" who can hang around your tea shop and add bonuses to some rolls.  They're more like magical creatures than actual pets, including a bee and a jumping spider.  Who is going to even notice those little things hanging around?  But I like the idea that these creatures are there, adding their vibe to the place.  For Day 8 and 9 on our note page shown above, we tried adding pets, but failed the adoption rolls.  We only had a few minutes.  Next time, I will add a proper Pets section.  I wondered right away what would happen if we attracted multiple pets ... would we get +4 to our rolls if we had four pets, or could only one be active at a time?  Their handlling of food and treats works fine for the cats and dogs, but what kind of food or treat would you give to the little gecko?  Do the pets leave if they get no treats for a week?  I'm still working on a way of balancing or expanding on this.

I also had some of my own add-ons rattling in my head.  Of course this happens when I am trying to sleep.  One thing the game does NOT need is money.  Let it be.  It's about interacting with customers, not how to pay the rent.  

So far, I have thought about these: 

1. a character deck with more biographical detail (modern world)
2. another character deck for putting your tea shop in a fantasy world
3. an expanded delivery system or a set of side-quests to find the ingredients in the wild

I like this one.  It's a relaxing alternative to all the battle games out there.  It's easy to build house rules for, so the little shop can be revisited and expanded when the mood is right.

You can also search itch.io for other Tea Shops to visit.  I tried the Wandering Tea Garden (by AP)
and am looking for others that might all coexist in some way.  There's the Last Tea Shop at the gates of death.  So many different ideas and takes on this theme.

Heck, I may fill a whole village where each business is a different solo RPG, where we could walk from place to place, constantly expanding the lore.