Why I Don't Play Solo

Half the games on my shelf shipped with a solo mode, an automa deck or a bot script or some app driven opponent, and by my own count I’ve actually used maybe three of them more than once. That’s not because I think solo modes are badly designed, some of them are genuinely clever pieces of engineering on their own, a whole game’s worth of AI logic condensed onto a deck of cards. I just don’t reach for them, and it took me a while to figure out why, since on paper a good solo mode should be exactly what a guy with a basement full of games and a limited number of nights to play them would want.

Here’s what I landed on. Almost everything I actually enjoy about this hobby happens in the gap between what I plan and what another person does about it, the read on whether someone’s bluffing a strong hand, the moment a plan falls apart because somebody made a move I genuinely didn’t see coming. A bot deck can simulate an opponent’s actions well enough to make the mechanics work, but it can’t simulate that specific feeling of being outmaneuvered by someone who was actually thinking, actually trying to beat you, sitting across the same table with the same stakes. Playing against a script feels closer to solving a puzzle than playing a game, and I’ve got nothing against puzzles, I just don’t think that’s what I’m usually reaching for a board game to give me.

There’s a practical piece of this too that I’ll admit up front. If I’m going to carve out an hour and a half from an evening that could otherwise go to my kids or to a book, I want that hour and a half to include another person, whether that’s Renae or Deke or whoever’s around that week. Solo play means I’m choosing the game over the company, and once I frame it that way the math stops making sense for me most nights, even on nights when nobody else is available and the alternative to a solo session is just not playing at all.

I know plenty of people whose whole hobby is built around solo play, shift workers, people whose schedules don’t line up with anyone else’s, and I’m not arguing their reasons are worse than mine, they’re just different constraints producing a different answer. Mine happens to be that I’ve got a house full of people upstairs most nights, and a game I could be playing against a deck of cards is a game I’d rather be playing against one of them instead.