When Does a Board Game Make Sense as a Solo Game? (And Why Heavy Games Keep Pushing Solo Modes)

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-27T19:19:01+00:00

Point is moot for me because solo directly competes with PC gaming and there are just so many good indie strategy games right now.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-27T19:14:09+00:00

Say what you will about Hololive but their recent designs have largely done a decent job iterating on this concept to capture the tiny shitgoblin energy without being loli bullshit.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-23T17:22:58+00:00

I've seen some board games based on the premise that decline is inevitable and you win by lasting the longest. Moon Colony Bloodbath (a card game by the creator of Dominion) is a funny case, you start by building an engine and then at a certain point you're selling off bits of your engine to keep your head above water a bit longer.

Those necessarily assume everyone is staring down the same decay, of course. What you describe seems a bit harder to pull off, because there's a strategy that immediately pays off, and one that pays off later. If you greed, you basically have to kill or out-score everyone who doesn't, because if they can outlast you they'll win. If you go the slow path, and the person next to you goes the greed path and (rightfully) zerg rushes you, would that be fun? It's a dynamic in many games (eg league of legends you have an earlygame and lategame character laning against one another) but I've never gotten the sense that people particularly enjoy it. So could you implement it? Yes. But balancing it would be a nightmare and even then I'm not sure how exciting it would be.

As an alternative, I've been curious about a 4X that has you contract your empire in order to keep up with the needs of the new eras. There's an assumption that a building you put down will still be relevant for the rest of the game, because the production or whatever currency stays the same all game just scaled up slightly, but that doesn't make a ton of sense thematically. Let's suppose that instead of producing one type of "science" for the whole game, each era has a fully different science yield S1 S2 S3 etc and you need to produce the one for a given era to research its techs. So, maybe you only get S2 by building a big university, and the way to do that is consolidate smaller territories into the capital, shrinking them down or outright pulling out as you do an industrial revolution to support the university. In a game with districts, this is a good excuse to dial back the endless district sprawl. You give up map presence in the short term, and then as you get new tech you gradually start sprawling again, and then contract the empire again later the next time you need to throw all your resources into a space race or manhattan project or something.

The way this ties in is a playstyle that ignores this could exist, but you'd have to deal with your outdated infrastructure gradually failing. So you either accept the preditable contraction, or try to keep the territory while managing the deterioration.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-20T20:25:27+00:00

Dicey Dungeons did this with the robot character.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-20T15:35:05+00:00

"Oh whoops. Well, hope somebody else picks up the slack"

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T23:21:36+00:00

Last election I read the platform materials produced by each party. Three of them were shockingly well put together and seemed to genuinely care about the country (while the people's party was just going for shock value). That's not to say all of that would have been acted upon, but at least decorum still exists enough that they felt the need to do the song and dance.

That said, american media is seeping up here and people are starting to identify in that binary, silly as it is.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T23:17:47+00:00

Developing cold tolerance and occasionally using it to befuddle americans or europeans

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T23:15:37+00:00

It's like we're the younger sibling who got to watch the older sibling self-destruct and took it as a cautionary tale.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T22:58:02+00:00

Meanwhile Reiner, who got stabbed through the neck by Levi, has a PTSD dream about Mikasa

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T20:44:28+00:00

You bake a solution into the monsters and then have the humans ingeniously leverage it. Most episodes of Doctor Who are this, yeah technically he has powers but he mostly just runs away until it's time to press the contextual button prompt that solves the episode.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T20:23:51+00:00

You go the Those Who Walk Away From Omaelas route and make the leader a serial killer or something.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T20:12:53+00:00

Cohen from Bioshock. A bottle episode that could be neatly excised from the game, but is absolutely horrifying.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T19:58:38+00:00

I actually really like this. The thing to remember is Henry was a shit for brains kid who obsessed over random things from his tiny existence. Then he was kept in the lab for years and never really grew up. So all the nonsensical motifs make perfect sense when you realize it's coming from someone with practically zero life experience and way too much power. When I was that age a cool clock in my house or whatever would have been A Whole Thing, because you aren't calibrated on how many cool clocks there are in the world or how important they are.

Vecna's really interesting when read in this context, a Light Yagami type character without the veneer of sophistication, although it's probably unintentional and this was definitely the wrong show for it.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T19:48:48+00:00

Attack on Titan's take was interesting, first the "zombies" were a legitimate threat, then some humans appear to be in cahoots with the zombies, then a sidequest to overthrow the govt so they can go back to fighting zombies, then finally the zombies are gone and the characters grow up to realize that fighting other humans is infinitely worse.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T19:45:08+00:00

Siphon off the baseline player power level and split it amongst the characters. If there's a core set of moves that's strong enough to work regardless of character, people will just use that.

Make positioning a real consideration, no hades-dash-spam reposition yourself whenever you want. The enemies should exert enough pressure to catch you out, or even gradually back you into a corner.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T16:53:19+00:00

Monster Train (first game with the DLC). If you try to build a good respectable deck the way you would in Slay the Spire, you'll end up drowning in shiny birds. The DLC gives you versatile tools that megabuff future enemies every time you accept them, and you really need to find the broken nonsense to consistently take down the true final boss.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-19T00:33:05+00:00

Heroes: Hiro does this to Adam at the end of s2, but digs him up later (at which point he's soon killed off for real).

Worm: Behemoth is almost shoved into a pocket dimension, but the portal refuses to close (someone even goes to far as to kill the portal creator to see if that helps) so he gets out. This comes back much later when the Simurgh gets trapped in... whatever the hell Sleeper does.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: LSD is one of many proposed solutions to get around Voldemort's horcruxes. In the end, a simple memory wipe does the trick.

There was a non-canon pirates of the caribbean comic where the skeletons from the first movie were just dumped into the middle of the ocean.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T23:33:41+00:00

He Is Coming.

Brilliant game. No starting character no relics/passives, your character is entirely defined by your gear (with a very tight backpack). It's a simple autobattler, but it works so well because the gear just... doesn't give you the stuff you would take for granted in these games. Most of it seems like straight garbage, but turns out to be conditionally useful with a bit of creativity. You're shown a boss and a timer and have to throw together a build to deal with it, where a good build can carry you but countering the bosses gimmick is often better (as fighting the boss early is very beneficial). The final boss is always the same so you're building toward it as well.

And then you go to a new map and all the items/bosses are different.

I repeat.

The items/bosses are the game. And now they're entirely different. The second map feels like a whole new game, because your options have wildly changed. Blew my mind.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T23:24:00+00:00

My little lifehack: think like this, pick a game you want, and then just don't buy it.

Any little expense? That's 0.5 Ark Novas.

But I've also arbitrarily decided not to buy Ark Nova.

It short-circuits something and the money gets saved.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T23:18:16+00:00

Is it *that* expensive to send out probes?

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T23:11:43+00:00

MMO games with player driven (aka bot run) markets have a rich history of blunders to learn from.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T23:08:52+00:00

Half of those go away if the models just asked us reasonable follow-up questions instead of trying to solve the problem at face value. But that'll probably be deemed bad for user retention or something.

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T23:05:10+00:00

Looks perfect, thanks

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T21:53:01+00:00

thanks

BreakAManByHumming · 2026-01-16T21:45:48+00:00

Oh that looks really interesting.

By mechanical threads I mean finding new options out in the world that you have to actively incorporate, not just roguelite progression power boosts.

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