These games are great and you don’t need anyone else to play them

The most difficult mechanic of any table game is finding people to play with. The logistical difficulties of organizing a group, the influx of high-quality indie TTRPGs, and countless other factors have given rise to something of a renaissance of solo tabletop role-playing games – particularly solo rules for games that would otherwise last for an entire period. group.

To be clear, the solo tabletop phenomenon is not new. As Polygon contributor Tom Ana explains, wargaming started in earnest in the ’80s, slowly growing in popularity over the next few decades until the quarantine period of the ongoing COVID pandemic provided a perfect moment for board games and TTRPGs. Standalone TTRPGs such as the historical one by Tim Hutchings Thousand year old vampireShawn Tompkins Rock solidChris Bisettes The miserable oneAnd Alone among the stars by Takuma Okada laid the foundation for solitary tabletop RPG experiences.

In the five years since 2020, demand has only grown. At PAX Unplugged last month, I heard a repeated refrain: people came looking for solo role-playing games. While so many great games have hit the market in recent years, tabletop gamers seem to have filled their shelves with games that they may never find a group to play. To address this, designers have started incorporating solo play into their rulesets – either by creating a secondary addition, by making solo rules a challenging goal during their crowdfunding campaigns, or by including them in the base game itself. The three games below represent the different approaches designers have taken to incorporating solo rules into their games.

Swedish game studio Free League Publishing has created solo rules for its Nordic Horror RPG Vaesen in 2023. The solo version of the game, written by Per Holmström, includes a step-by-step guide that shifts the predetermined mystery of the base game to one you discover along the way. Use a deck of cards and the random tables from the core book, solo Vaesen lets players uncover the mystery by rolling dice to determine their discoveries, while using the color and value of the cards to determine the outcome of their actions.

Based on the classic hook and ring game, HUNT(er/ed) by Meghan Cross and Dillin Apelyan has two players take on the opposite roles of hunter and monster. Players each roll 2d6 and compete to see who can roll a double first to move their token around the board. The winner then draws a card with an associated prompt, pushing the story forward in the same tradition as games like For The Queen. The solo iteration of the game lasts HUNTER(er/ed)‘s core experience of exploring monstrosity and forces the player to move along a scale of acceptance or denial. A stretch goal for HUNT(er/ed)‘s crowdfunding campaign is the solo ruleset written by Elliot Davis, who has written his own solo game, Project Eccoas well as solo editions of Muppet’s Soul Orbital blues And Paint the city red.

A surreal play-to-lose horror game inspired by that of Jeff VanderMeer Destruction, The Zone leaned fully into solo play from the jump. In a similar way to YACHT(er/ed), This game relies on card-based clues to guide players through a quarantined, mutation-filled zone, from which only one of them will escape alive. Each action requires drawing a “Not-So-Easy” card, which has a “yes, and” or “no, but” outcome. Advertised as a 1-6 person game (rather than 2-6 with a GM), solo rules were always baked in The Zone. The solo rules remain largely the same, except that the single player controls multiple characters.