Degrees of Solitaire

“Solitude is independence.”

— Hermann Hesse

I have, out of recent necessity, focused more on the solitaire game experience across all aspects of my adventure gaming hobby. I haven’t had a regular gaming group for a while, but I still indulge in games on my own, enjoying the occasional afternoon with a few like-minded friends around a few board games or the rare instance I attempt to convince them to try a roleplaying game. I find some satisfaction engaging in solitary game activities most of us enjoy: reading and comprehending rules for new games (or reviewing old favorites); developing materials for roleplaying games; painting miniatures and crafting terrain; and reading historical non-fiction to support my gaming activities. But sometimes you just want to play a game. Doing so without other players provides varying degrees of satisfaction depending on the nature of the solitaire play. Looking back on my own experiences, I classified my solo gaming into three categories: player-versus-player (PVP), cooperative, and true solitaire.

I’ve frequently discussed solitaire games and my engagement with them, notably in “Solo Play: My Own Worst Enemy,” but I’m often drawn back to the topic as I discover new ways to look at solitaire play and find new-to-me games to play on my own. Categorizing them into three modes helps me evaluate what games are right for my solo inclinations, both when considering what games to bring to the table and which ones to possibly add to my collection.

PVP Solo

People have been playing multiplayer games against themselves for a long time. In The Complete Waragames Handbook — one of the core texts on wargaming — James F. Dunnigan claims most wargamers prefer playing both sides in solitaire games:

“Playing wargames solitaire is by far the favorite mode for most wargamers. The most common reasons for playing solitaire are lack of an opponent or preference to play without an opponent, so that the player may exercise his own ideas about how either side in the game should be played without interference from another player.... For those players who do like to play with opponents, solitaire play is valued as a means of perfecting tactics and techniques in a particular game that will enhance the chances of success.”

One can play most any game solitaire by running each player in turn. Two-player games remain ideal for this kind of solo activity; tracking the actions of three or more players adds more levels of complexity. Solo PVP play can allow a single player to try almost any multiplayer game, though games focusing on core bluffing mechanics won’t work quite as well. Playing both sides provides a good way to learn the rules and gain firsthand experience without dragging other players into muddling through a rulebook and interpreting problematic mechanics. As Dunnigan notes, this technique also allows one to explore the game dynamics, testing different strategies in a “safe to fail” environment. It’s also a good method of quickly playtesting rules under development.

Red block forces are visible, while white
block unit information faces the opponent.

Immersive focus helps shift one’s conscious knowledge of the “opponent’s” disposition and intentions. If you can concentrate only on your situation and plans, you might mentally ignore the part of your brain playing the opponent. I’ve found this easier with games employing concealment mechanics, most notably block wargames like many produced by Columbia Games and Worthington Publishing; units on upright blocks show stats to only one player, concealing force details beyond the number of blocks themselves (and even that can still deceive opponents). Setting up the board on a large lazy susan can help with focus issues by rotating the board to one particular player’s perspective as turns progress. I enjoy this PVP solitaire gaming — certainly for learning new rules — but my favorites include ones with built-in elements to stymie the single player, notably one-sided blocks. This helps maintain the fog of war, even if, on alternate turns, I’m going to see those unit details anyway. When I swap sides, though, I somewhat willfully forget where certain now-enemy units stand, especially when trying to leverage my own known forces.

Germanic tribesmen (foreground) await
advancing Roman troops.

I’ve done a good deal of PVP solo gaming over my more than 40 years in the hobby. When I was a bachelor I had the liberty to clear the kitchen table for a multi-day game of Kingmaker. I’ve played multiple characters — including the gamemaster — in various roleplaying game adventures for different systems, including Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons and Empire of the Petal Throne. I spent some time during the covid-19 pandemic using Bob Cordery’s Portable Wargame Rules (with the ancients rules in Developing the Portable Wargame) running battles between Imperial Romans and Germanic tribesmen. I’ve used this technique frequently to learn and understand board games with the intent to teach others. This method has served me well for playtesting, both my own games under development and examining those for other designers seeking feedback. My favorites remain block wargames like Columbia Games’ Richard III and Liberty: American Revolution as well as Worthington’s Holdfast Tunisia and Wilderness Empires.

Cooperative Solo

My previous explorations of solitaire play did not take into account playing cooperative games as the single player, something relatively new to the gaming landscape. Since the emergence of cooperative games like Matt Leacock’s innovative Pandemic (2008) and Forbidden Island (2010), the form has birthed numerous games in which players all work together toward a shared goal while the game mechanics — sometimes called a “bot” — handle the function of an opposing player. In most cases such games can accommodate a single player, either as the rules stand or with some slight modification to enable solitaire play (usually evening the odds when playing against the rules engine). And if you want to introduce them to friends, playing them solitaire still serves as a good exercise for learning the game before teaching others.

Some of these games work better than others, as I’ve discovered. Ones like Forbidden Island and Castle Panic rely on multiple players trading resources or working together, so additional rules adjusting the game for solo play help. But in general cooperative games listing a player count starting with “1” tell me they’re worth trying solitaire. Almost any game driven by the Pandemic game engine works well solo; my favorite remains Star Wars The Clone Wars Game, though I really should bring Pandemic: Fall of Rome to the game table. I’m also eagerly awaiting the upcoming June 2025 release of Leacock’s latest implementation of the Pandemic engine, Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship.

Like many gamers I have my own collection of fandoms I engage with to varying degrees (such as the aforementioned Lord of the Rings). So I love when my game tastes intersect with my favorite books and movies. Two cooperative games ideal for solo play inhabit this intersection: Alien: Fate of the Nostromo and Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps. I took a deeper look at both games earlier in “A Tale of Two Alien Games.” While both cooperative, they provide an excellent solitaire game experience, each one drawing on the distinct hallmarks of their films. Both demonstrate how good cooperative games can easily port to solo play.

True Solo

Designers created these games exclusively for solitaire play, including specific solo scenarios for roleplaying games. They do not accommodate additional players unless you want to make those modifications yourself. In my earliest days in the adventure gaming hobby purely solitaire games remained rare, but notable: B-17 Queen of the Skies; many programmed solo adventures for Tunnels & Trolls; solitaire gamebooks like Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! and the Fighting Fantasy books; the massive boxed solo scenario On Her Majesty’s Secret Service for the James Bond 007 Roleplaying Game; and a few programmed solo adventures for B/X D&D like Ghost of Lion Castle. These were few and far between, exceptions in the days when society expected people to play games together, no on their own.

In our “enlightened” 21st century the purely solitaire game belongs to a genre unto its own across the adventure gaming hobby. I’ve indulged in multiple plays of many excellent true solo games: Agricola, Hidden Strike: American Revolution (despite my intense frustration with it at times), Maquis, The Lucky Seven, The Fields of Normandy, Pacific War 1942 Solitaire, Tarawa 1943, A Gentle Rain...many titles I’ve briefly touched on in earlier blog posts or featured on their own. Worthington Publishing in particular has brought to publication a number of good solo games on historical subjects.

Roleplaying games have also embraced the pure solo form, both in offering solitaire adventures like the classic Tunnels & Trolls and as entire games intended for solo play. Chief among the latter are games from Shawn Tomkin in the Ironsworn line: Ironsworn for fantasy (still available in free digital format), Ironsworn: Starforged for spacefaring action, and Sundered Isles for seafaring adventure. They remain the most flexible among these solitaire game categories and for catering to different group play styles. They operate in three modes: traditional gamemaster-hosted group play; cooperative, co-gamemaster play; and purely solo. Tomkin recently posted an excellent Bluesky thread on the vast constellation of solo roleplaying games available today. Patrick Buechner at The Soloist also explored solitaire roleplaying game offerings with links to interesting games.

I’m also lumping into this category multi-player games providing solitaire rules beyond “run all the other players yourself.” (Still a rare category, though.) With the ascendance of purely solitaire games and the slightly greater acceptability of solo play, more games of all kinds offer options for enjoying them on one’s own. I’m sure if I dove into my various game collections I’d find several, but the one that immediately comes to mind is Daniel Mersey’s The Men Who Would Be Kings, which has a short chapter on using the rules for solo scenarios called, appropriately enough for a Victorian-era game, “Playing Against Mr. Babbage.”

Final Thoughts

I wanted to explore these three solitaire play modes to help me understand my own solo gaming activities. Each one provides a different kind of experience across the various game forms. Some, like PVP Solo, account for a great deal of flexibility in games available for solo play. Others, like True Solo, might seem restricted to a limited set of games, yet can offer a more immersive, focused solitaire experience. Cooperative Solo games straddle the solo-multiplayer line, offering flexibility in the method of play. As in many subjective activities, your mileage may vary. But understanding the kinds of solitaire games available — and what they can offer us — can help us choose what’s right to play in a particular moment.

“I restore myself when I’m alone.”

— Marilyn Monroe