Solo Boardgaming

fan-made card I love playing Twilight Struggle . Well, not as much as playing COIN games, but almost on a par. And whilst I can indulge in playing COIN games even when I can’t find a partner thanks to the bots or the Jacquard cards, the same isn’t true for Twilight Struggle  for want of a dedicated solo system. I’ve obviously scoured the internetz to find one, and while some are interesting ( Stuka Joe’s and its variants), some others are simply delirious, verging on pseudocode. The one I’m currently working on has been inspired by Fort Sumter ’s solo rules and by Jason Carr’s blog entry about designing a solo bot for  Twilight Struggle: Red Sea — but not by the solo bot itself. The most notable influence from that blog post is the Solo Opponent’s ability to play Opponent-Aligned cards for Ops without triggering the event. Anyway, without further ado, here are my (WiP) Solo Opponent rules for Twilight Struggle . ⁂ Preliminary note: Realignment Rolls (6.2) are not used in t...

A great blog entry by Jason Carr about solitarianating a game that looks almost impossible to solitarianate ( Twilight Struggle ) because of the reliance of its game play upon not knowing your opponent’s cards, and because one of the key elements of its core strategy resides in reacting to your opponent’s unwanted triggering of favourable events. Well, Jason Carr explains how he eliminated both yet kept the feel of the original game. A very inspiring read. I also like the section  about how he got inspiration from  Bruce Mansfield’s Jacquard bot system and its use of a “stacked dot chart” rather than the usual algorithmic kind of solo system. Available here .

The year is 2020. Because of the lockdown, I have played quite a few solo games of GMT Games’  excellent series of COIN wargames. And since Liberty or Death: The American Insurrection  by Harold Buchanan is my favourite COIN game (or at least one of my favourite ones), I have played a lot of solo LoD games. And since “British Return to New York” is my favourite scenario set-up, I have played it a lot. Twelve times, actually. Which I think warrants an analysis of the results. With four Winter Quarters cards and French preparations at 9, “British Return to New York” guarantees that the French are in the war at the end of the first campaign or at the beginning of the second one, meaning the game is going to be meaty soon enough. The length of the game also makes sure that many if not all Brilliant Stroke cards will be played (something I haven’t seen in the sorter scenarios). Here are the statistics from the twelve games I’ve played; four as the British player, three as the Pa...

Much like the last game I have reviewed ( The Summer of the Boxers ), La Libération de Paris describes an asymmetric urban conflict. It is also a solo wargame from within the pages of a French gaming magazine— in this case, issue No.82 of Casus Belli . However, whereas The Summer of the Boxers was an entertaining, suspenseful game, La Libération de Paris was quite a bore. Yet I think it could have been a great game. I'll call it “a great failed game”. Let us see why. The game components are as follows: 6 pages of rules & tables (within the magazine) a zone-based A4 map of Paris in August 1944, with all the necessary tables and tracks counters (that you must cut and paste yourself): Free French, German, US forces, and many markers having ‘fun’ with the counters the map is quite large the finished counters & markers The solo player plays the French Forces of the Interior at the time of the Liberation of Paris . The ‘system’ plays the German forces a...

The Summer of the Boxers is a solo wargame published in issue 136 of the French wargaming magazine Vae Victis . The game is in French (with almost no language-dependent text on the counters), and the rules can be downloaded for free from Vae Victis' web-site ( here ) so I thought I might as well start this blog with an English-language review of the game. Also, it is a game specifically designed to be played as a solo game, rather than the adaptation of a multi-player game to the solo format, which also makes it quite interesting as the very first game to be featured on this blog. (My current plan is to review a new game each week, with a mix of specific solo games and adaptations of standard games to the solo format. I also want to cover all kinds of boardgames and not only wargames.) The game components are as follows: a 15-page rulebook a zone-based A3 map of the Peking Legation Quarter at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, with a morale track and a supply track at the si...

There has been an explosion in both the amount of boardgames published each year and the number of people who play them for quite a few years now. For instance, there were approximately 1,000 boardgames published yearly before the year 2000, whereas there are about 3,000 at the moment — and this figure doesn't even take expansions into account! And yet, despite the growing popularity of boardgames, there are still many times when you cannot gather the required amount of people to play that cool game lying on your shelf... and so you get back playing Catan or Ticket to Ride for the umpteenth time. As implied by its name, this blog will explore solo boardgaming, but also how to use multi-player boardgames as solo boardgames , by suggesting solo mechanics, alternative rules, random tables, etc. Watch this space!