This blog is all about solo board gaming and my 40+ years (yikes!) of pulling up a chair to a table for one.
Join me as I explore my ever-changing board game collection and dig into various topics about – and adjacent to – the solo board gaming hobby!
My board game biography
The early days
I am an early member of Generation X. You can think of me as being a kid in the 70s and a teenager in the 80s (because that’s true).
It turned out that timing was perfect for hobby gaming (both analog and digital)!
Early on, the usual board games were present in our house – Monopoly, Risk, and various card games played with the family.
But I also remember joining neighborhood kids for “new” games, like Bermuda Triangle, The Sinking of the Titanic, and The Mad Magazine Game.
Roll and move games dominated our play time, but it felt like our little gaming world was broadening beyond the “classics”.
What sorcery is this?
Somewhere in the mid-70s my dad introduced me to a copy of Strat-O-Matic Baseball from his childhood. The box contained cards and dice but any similarity to my other games ended there.
Sure, it came with a board – a stylized infield for tracking baserunners – but you didn’t need the board to play it. And, unlike the make-believe worlds of many mass-market games, SOM was a baseball simulation. Its cards even had the names of real players!
The subject, components, and play style of that game hinted that a broader gaming world lay somewhere beyond the department store shelves.
Then, at a third-grade lunch table, I was introduced to a true “game changer”.
Dungeons & Dragons was a revelation. It was unlike any game I’d come across. Seeing its components laid out on a table was like getting a glimpse into some secret world unknown to the masses (at the time, I guess maybe it was).
D&D immediately captured my imagination, and I shared its role-playing goodness with as many friends as I could. It dominated my gaming experiences for the next several years.
The games get heavier
In the late 70s, a friend showed me a game that his dad had recently gifted him. It looked as different from the games I was familiar with as D&D had looked from Monopoly.
Four (four!) game boards were spread across his floor. There were no ordinary “spaces” on the board, only dozens of hexagons forming a map of World War II Europe.
My friend dumped a bunch of tiny cardboard pieces next to it, placed two sets of the pieces in opposing corners, and explained to me that the game played a lot like chess.
I quickly realized that he had no idea how the game played.
But something about that map and those game pieces sparked my curiosity.
I eventually tracked down my own copy of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich and set it up in my bedroom.
Its sheer size was intimidating. The board overhung the sides of my folding card table – a fact reinforced whenever I leaned my elbows on it. A couple nearby shelves had to be used for the off-map components. The rulebook lived in my lap.
I then spent the next few weeks trying to parse its 32 pages of rules, printed in tiny font spread across three columns on each page.
My learning effort was only mildly successful, but my interest was captured.
Like most wargames at the time, Third Reich was a multiplayer game. Alone in my room, I played both sides against each other – a seemingly common early “solo” gaming experience.
The digital age
As the 70s turned into the 80s, I still played board games with friends – exciting new mainstream titles like Stop Thief and Dark Tower – but solo games, especially wargames, were consuming most of my gaming time.
And then my board gaming world was completely disrupted.
The 80s saw the rise of video games, of course, and we teenagers were the perfect demographic for them. Games gradually spread from arcades to home entertainment systems to personal computers to handheld devices – and we followed at each step.
Family and party games still hit the table throughout those years, but my time spent with hobby board games significantly diminished.
Like many, video games were my dominant gaming outlet for the next 25+ years.
My board gaming redux
By the 2010s I had a family of my own and even video games take a backseat to that. I was also well into my second decade as an IT professional and I was growing tired of staring at screens all day.
I was aware that board games had been going through a recent popularity resurgence and had heard of titles like The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.
Looking for less-competitive contemporary titles, I soon had copies of the cooperative games Pandemic and Forbidden Island in my Amazon cart. My thought being that maybe my family would join me at the table for some unplugged entertainment.
That idea met with only moderate success. My family humored me with an occasional gaming session, but it was clear that board gaming was unlikely to become a regular pastime for them.
Happily, I found that cooperative board games were becoming more common. I still had no issue playing multiplayer games alone but playing a cooperative game by myself seemed like a no-brainer.
Titles like Eldritch Horror and The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game showed me just how far board games had come since my teenage years.
I was quickly sucked back into the hobby and my board game shelf began to expand again!
And here we are!
Solo board gaming has become even more mainstream over the last decade.
Solo games, co-op games that can be played solo, and solo modes for competitive games (both official and unofficial fan-made solo rules), are now commonplace in the hobby.
Whether you want to squeeze a quick game into a few free minutes, or spend days playing through a multi-session campaign, you’ll find a solo game to fit your time, table, and budget.
It’s a great time to be a solo board gamer!