Solo Gaming - Digital and Otherwise

by Mat Thomsen

I am currently enjoying the solo variant of A Feast for Odin. I'm really enjoying it. I am up to ten solo plays of it in fact, and it has got me wondering why this game has been such a satisfying solo experience. The biggest and most obvious reason is that I actually bothered to set it up, learn the solo rules, and play through an entire game. I can't really say that about many games. I did spend one afternoon playing a few solo games of Battle For Souls and enjoyed it, but never played it again. When the solo rules came out for Fleet, I gave it a shot and did not enjoy it at all. I loved everything about Navajo Wars but never managed to leave the nest after playing through the tutorial assisted by the how-to-play videos. Ghost Stories, was another one I tried solo and one I may revisit, but it did not capture my attention, or desire for repeated plays the way A Feast for Odin has.

I'm not a huge fan of Uwe Rosenberg's games, but I do like Le Havre, and it has never even occurred to me to try it solo. So what is it about A Feast for Odin that allowed me to get over the solo-play hump when all of these other experiences failed to do so? Allow me to speculate:

1) The solo variant was clearly explained, easy to grasp, and equaled the two-player experience for the most part. As I was reading the rulebook and came upon the solo rules section, I could see at a glance exactly how it worked. This played a large part in my willingness to give it try.

2) Close to the end of the short solo rules section was a sentence I could not shake:

I really struggled during my first few plays of this game. This was before I tried the solo version and I was getting smacked around by the other players who seemed to have a natural understanding of what to do and how to do it. They scored three figures easily, while I lingered between 70-90 points. This range was just close enough for that sentence in the rule book to trigger an abnormal determination within me.

3) It's Tetris! There is a reason that Tetris remains a worldwide phenomenon. It's an addictive puzzle that players can come back to hundreds of times hoping to improve their scores. Yes, this game has all of the classic Uwe worker-placement tropes (game number ?? to use the same wooden bits for wood, stone and ore), but here, your workers get you Tetris pieces!

Now, I have a feeling that last sentence may have set the Uwe snobs into full attack mode, but that's fine because I finally have a Uwe game I'm excited about, and that should calm the masses slightly.

4) Another common trait among Uwe's games is having multiple point-paths to explore. The solo version of A Feast for Odin shines an intense spotlight on this idea. Because you are essentially playing two sets of workers, you are forced to diversify, but diversify too much, and your path will fade and you end up lost in the woods. It's great fun to focus on exploration boards during one play, and animals in another. I have also found it interesting to discover which parts of the game I consistently return to, emigration for example. I'm at the point now however, where I'm realizing certain plays have become a crutch because I have not figured out how to maximize points using other strategies.

I'm looking forward to additional solo plays of this game. I'm hoping it has opened my mind to try other games solo where I may not have considered it before. But I do feel this game is kind of a perfect solo storm - it generates determination by issuing a challenge in the rulebook, it offers an incredibly satisfying Tetris puzzle, and its solo mechanics run smoothly and are easy to play and understand.

Playing "Solo" Digitally

I wanted to take a moment during this solo-play exploration to discuss my limited digital board game experience. First, I would like to know how you feel about playing board games digitally versus playing them solo on a table. To be clear, I'm interested in the idea of playing digital games solo, not via pass-and-play or online with other players. For me, and many others I think, we play board games for the social experience it offers, so Ticket to Ride is not a game I'm interested in playing digitally vs. an AI.

There are two digital versions of board games however, that I thoroughly enjoy, Ingenious and Kingdom Builder. I should mention that, as an Android user, my choices are far more limited than that of my Apple-using brethren. But these two games are excellent time-killers. More importantly, and more on-topic, these games are great puzzles. Ingenious especially provides a visually appealing brain teaser that I would put in the same category as Tetris. There are certainly mechanical differences, but my point is, the same thing that keeps me coming back to A Feast for Odin, has my plays of Ingenious on my phone in the hundreds. And while Kingdom Builder offers a very different kind of puzzle, it does trigger a similar determination to improve my performance.

What solo games have you enjoyed? Which ones have you tried and never returned to? For the ones you do play often, what is it about that experience that keeps you coming back? How do these compare to your experiences with digital implementations of board games that you also play solo? This has been a new experience for me and I'm curious to hear how others have fared playing solo.

Thanks for reading!