I Was Wrong About Solo Gaming

For years I treated solo board gaming as a fallback, something you did when the group fell through, not something you’d actually choose on purpose. I own a lot of games that say one to four or one to six on the box, and if you’d asked me five years ago whether I’d ever crack one open by myself on purpose, I’d have said probably not, what’s the point of a competitive system with only one competitor.

This War of Mine is the game that actually broke that assumption for me, and I didn’t expect it to. I picked it up mostly out of curiosity about the theme, civilians surviving a siege, a narrative booklet doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and I assumed I’d need to wrangle a full group to get the real experience the box promised. Instead I played it alone on a quiet weeknight because nobody else was around, and it turned out to be the best version of the game by a wide margin. No one else in the room to lighten a genuinely heavy moment with a joke, no one to defer a hard decision to. Just me and a handful of survivors and choices that don’t have clean answers.

I hate to admit it took me that long to notice the pattern, but once I did I started seeing it everywhere. Arkham Horror: The Card Game surprised me the same way, I assumed solo play would feel like a consolation prize compared to a full table of investigators, and instead a single well-built character against the mythos turned out to be a genuinely complete experience on its own terms, not a lesser one.

What I think I had wrong wasn’t about the games. It was about what I assumed solo play was for. I’d filed it under “what you do when you can’t get people together,” a workaround, when really it’s its own mode with its own strengths, a kind of focus and immersion that a full table sometimes actually gets in the way of. I still love playing with Priya, that’s not changing, two players is still where most of my heart lives. But I’ve stopped treating the games on my shelf that shine alone as somehow less than the ones that need a crowd. Some stories are just better told to one person at a time, even when that person is also the one telling it to themselves.