Now that I have a table dedicated to solo gaming, and all three of my children are sleeping through the night†, I have been doing more gaming in the evenings.
With the BGG 1 Player Guild’s upcoming Top 200 voting (votes due in a week or less), I decided to do my best to play at least 20 solo games (spoiler: I haven’t and won’t) so that I could have a well-informed fresh impression of these games in order to rank them.
These are their stories:
Merchants of the Dark Road – did not finish. The game’s random setup state and first turn put me in a position to do an AI travel action as the very first thing in the game, which took me about an hour to muddle through. Afterwards, I was pretty sure I messed up at least one thing and I had zero clue what I should be focusing on after that – the action menu is very broad and the game gives you very few nudges in any given direction; capitalizing on the AI’s next travel action would have been where I started… but even that was a bust when it came time for my first turn. I packed the game away after playing a single turn of the AI.
Kanban EV – I set this one up immediately after packing away Merchants of the Dark Road, but it took me two weeks before I had read the rulebook, watched a solo playthrough video, and was confident in the rules enough to proceed with playing the game. The first night of actually playing the game was straight-forward, but I ended up referencing the rulebook a lot for the iconography. I spent the rest of the night printing out a player aid and refreshing myself on the solo rules (specifically). The next time I sat down to play it, I played nearly the entire thing to completely in one sitting; finishing it the next night.
The solo system is so smooth in this game. It’s literally smoother in play than it has any right to be. In general, I tend to not like AI/bots/automas because they just feel arbitrary and unfair; like playing with a drunk friend who you let cheat and do whatever they want just so you have an opponent to play against. The solo Ai in Kanban EV is absolutely not that way. They are predictable and their actions rarely defeat or spoil your plans; more often than not, they just complicate them; so what was a “okay, my next 4 moves need to be W, X, Y, and Z” turns into “okay, my next 5 moves need to be W, X, A, Y, Z” instead.
I thoroughly enjoyed Kanban EV as a solo experience. It is a VERY large, very EXPENSIVE box, though; and I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about it as a multiplayer experience. I’m sure it will be fine… but likely not “great”.
Gentes – I feel as though the “deluxified” components of this game have lost the plot. They seem less practical than the pictures/videos I’ve seen of the normal components. The game itself is an action-efficiency euro with some clever resource management. It’s actually a worker placement game, but instead of worker placement, it’s a action-removal mechanism.
I struggled to get an efficiency engine to “sing”, so I lost and didn’t really know how I could have done better.
This one I would definitely prefer multiplayer, I think; but I wonder how good it would be even as that?
AuZtralia – I picked this up on recommendation of my former neighbor. I was amazed at how solid of an experience this game is. I’m sure the multiplayer feels similar, but the solo experience was just outstanding. In the same way that a good deck-builder game asks players to perform a shift between “building your deck” and “winning the game,” without explicitly forcing that player to with a gamestate change; there’s nothing that separates the early game of AuZtralia, where you are building your rails and farms and collecting resources, to the mid-game where the Old Ones wake up and start threatening your infrastructure, and the end-game where you are trying to hold on, hunker down and just survive until the end.
The game creates a natural arc with nothing more than a few discs on a time track. Early on, mobilizing your military is fast and effective. But later in the game, you’ll want to mobilize more and more types of units, which means you’ll be taking 6 time to deal with that one Old One, while the Old Ones can march half-way across the map in that same time.
The tension is incredible, but it didn’t feel oppressive. I went from, early in the game, thinking “I must be doing something wrong; this is so easy!” to later thinking, “Oh, I’ve made mistakes, this is going to be impossible!” to, at the end, thinking “I must have missed a rule somewhere… I… survived!”
I wanted to put Architects of the West Kingdom on my table next… but… I cannot find it.[1] It’s lost on my shelves somewhere, I guess. So I have Paladins of the West Kingdom half-setup now, instead.
†: sometimes?
EDIT:
[1]: Stand down, everyone. The game in question has been found.
