Playing Solo Boardgames

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!

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Twilight Struggle, Solitarianated

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...

The Summer of the Boxers, 55 Days in Peking

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...

Solitarianating a non-Solo Game

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 .

Solo Boardgaming

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