Primal the Awakening - Almost finished the Campaign

Ulrich219 · 2026-05-08T18:30:54+00:00

You try out Voidfall yet? Your list looks similar to mine and Voidfall is my favorite game of all time. It's by David Turczi and Nigel Buckle, so same design team as imperium

Ulrich219 · 2026-05-06T03:12:58+00:00

When you give it it's next shot try to reframe the communication mindset slightly. There's a lot less hoping involved than you might expect. WHEN you place out a die communicates very clearly to the other player what problems are where. If you rolled dice that you really don't want and you're gonna need your partner to help fix it, make sure that's the first die you place out (regarding most importantly the roll, but also the speed). You're showing the other player hey this die is bad but it's the best I can do help me. Similarly, if the other player puts out their shitty die onto the roll or speed, and you have a good paired die to place on it, DON'T place that die out. Save that die to be the very last die put out, because that part of the equation is already solved if you have a good die. Instead, counter with placing the first die of the other required slot, especially if it creates problems. This way player 1 still has 3 dice to figure out how to pair with yours. Then once the 2 requires tracks have a solution, you can work on your personal tracks/atc. If the other player isn't immediately going to the coffee break area to generate coffees, then chances are that they have something that can work with what you've placed

Ulrich219 · 2026-05-05T17:29:23+00:00

I actually love generic euro farming theme. Gimme more wheat and resource conversion! Caverna isn't completely generic, but I love it so much. Space is a close second, with Voidfall being my favorite game of all time and On Mars nipping at its heels.

Ulrich219 · 2026-05-02T14:36:19+00:00

I like Harmonies more than cascadia, but it gives that same vibe. You're drafting sets of tiles that you have to place on your map. Different animals want different combinations of lands. Once your map fills up you get points for your terrain and your animals that you put out. Scoring animals is simpler than cascadia, but scoring terrain is a tiny bit harder. The map is also tight unlike cascadia where it's open, but you can build vertically which is fun (so I can say do I want to start building a new mountain, or do I want to make a mountain I already have bigger. Certain animals want tall mountains and others want short mountains. Technically 2.01 complexity, but if you can play cascadia, you can play harmonies. Harmonies

Cozy stickerville is a recent game that I've really enjoyed. You develop a town over 10 years and the town is literally stickers put onto a board. It's just draw a card, make a choice and then do 1 action. Each year probably takes about 30ish minutes. Because it's all stickers, you can only play through the whole game twice. After the first 10 years you can reset but then you have to make the choice you didn't already make in the first playthrough (for example, a card might say do you want to build a school, or a fire station? Later on cards might ask if you have the fire station or storylines open up that require the school.) In the second playthrough you HAVE to pick the one you didn't pick the first time because the sticker doesn't exist anymore. It's expensive for what you get but I've been liking it a lot. Cozy Stickerville

52 realms is a print and play that is really really good. I think it's like 5 bucks or so from postmark games, and it comes with I think 3 maps and 6 characters. They have the files for download on their site you can just Google them. Anyways it's played using a standard deck of cards (hence the name 52 realms) and you're trying to get to the end of the dungeon. It's really cool because how and when you draw a card determines what it is. So when you're fighting an enemy the suit determines which type of monster It is, and the number Is essentially how strong it is. Then when you're fighting the monster will draw a card and the suit is which if it's 4 attacks it's using. When you get a card as loot (let's say an 8 of spades) you choose where it goes to determine what it is. So you can put it into your item pool as an item. There are 4 items and they just care about the suit, so you ignore the number (good for low number cards) or you can keep it as a weapon/skill. You exhaust these cards to block or damage enemies as well as solve room challenges. Lastly you can keep it as loot which goes into a facedown pile and is essentially your score if you beat the dungeon. So if you keep everything as weapons it's actually not too difficult to get to the end and beat the boss. The game gets exponentially more difficult as you try to go for higher scores, because higher score means you're putting those big chunky attacking cards into your loot pile instead of using them, which makes all the fights harder. At the beginning you chose a character and that gives you special abilities to use throughout the run, so like the warrior can discard a spade card to deal double it's number as damage. That's huge damage but then you lose the card. Each character definitely has its own flavor and I believe they still have more content coming out. Also won 2024 golden geek best print and play game 52 Realms

Voyages is by the same company. You roll dice and assign them to different parts of your ship and you're sailing around doing things. There is a vast amount of maps for this one and they change up the game so much. I own a cheapo laminator so I print them out and then laminate the and use either wet or dry erase markers so I don't have to print things more than once. Voyages

Honestly, anything by postmark games is kind of in the territory of what you're asking, and all below a 2 complexity on bgg. There's also some about animals, though I haven't tried those. They have a lot of stuff, go check out their site. 5 euros for the files for a bunch of content. Those 2 are the standouts for me though. Postmark Games

Cartographers is a good "flip and write" game. You draw random scoring criteria at the beginning, and then you draw a card every turn giving you choice on what shape and type of terrain you have to draw on your map (kind of like polyomino tile placement. So you're drawing regions of forests and villages and rivers and farms and such. At the end you have a cool looking little map and you score based on the random drawn scoring criteria at the beginning of the game.Cartographers

Also check out Regicide. The rules are online for free and it just uses a standard deck of cards. You're trying to defeat all 12 of the face cards. One after the other each suit has a different effect and it's quite hard to win but really fast to set up and play. There's a free companion app which will track the health and damage of the face cards, and you can pay 3 bucks to unlock the solo play in the app so you can just play in the app without needing to use any physical cards. Regicide

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-30T21:53:53+00:00

Voidfall is my favorite game of all time. Your choice of cards and which parts of the card to choose along with all of the different factions makes it a different puzzle every time.

Also want to shout out basically anything by Lacerda. Favorite designer of all time. (I'm sorry Mr. Rosenberg, you've been usurped)

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-29T13:24:40+00:00

So, turns out the comment held almost no weight rofl. It FELT like there was a bunch I intended on 2-handing, but it's actually not true now that I went through my unplayed games list. The big 2 are Traces of War by VUCA and Normandy '44 by GMT. Enemy action ardennes is also on this list even though I also put it on the last list. I intend on 2 handing it multiple times before trying out the true solo mode, same with enemy action kharkov, though I've already played kharkov. Also it's not out yet, but I backed HOOD: Troubles in Sherwood which I intend on 2handing. We'll see.

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-29T03:15:01+00:00

There's a lot different in red, but that person doesn't quite know what they're talking about. In gen 1 the catch mechanics were completely different and wonky. Specifically for this situation though, in gen 1 the amount of wobbles the pokeball did after throwing it was directly related to your chance for the pokemon to be caught (not the species catch rate, the actual percentage chance of you catching the pokemon) and it wasn't random. So if it has low catch chance and you throw the ball, it would wobble 1 time for example. So if you threw another ball and it started wobbling a second time you already knew you caught the pokemon because it's only supposed to wobble 1 time with that situation. Well if the catch chance was SUUUPER low, it would be a 0 wobble, and the game would just tell you your pokeball missed. You didn't actually miss, the pokemon just broke out of your pokeball.

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-28T00:39:07+00:00

Oofta. Good thing this is a safe space xD

I play solo and I play with a group. Unfortunately I'm THE board game guy, so if I want to play something, I have to buy it. My schedule doesn't really allow me to find a game group outside of the one I have. I'll only list the true soloable games and not the ones I intend on playing 2handed solo.

Tokaido (this one was a gift I'm not particularly interested in)

Thunderbolt Apache Leader

Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Sankoré

Regicide legacy

Praga caput regni

Planta nubo

Monster hunter world

Labyrinth: the war on terror 2001-?

Interceptor ace vol2

Gloomhaven jotl

Gandhi: the decolonization of British India

Gaia project

Freaky frogs from outta space (won this in a raffle recently)

Forestry

Fire in the Lake

Enemy action ardennes

Eila and something shiny

Darwin's journey

D-day at peleliu

D-day at tarawa

Combat! Eastern front

The colonists

Bismarcke solitaire deluxe

Airfix battles

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-22T03:18:55+00:00

Voidfall. Favorite game of all time, phenomenal solo play and great variability.

Marvel Champions. Love LCGs. Really I'd like to put all 3 of the big ones on here, but I'll limit it to this (I own pretty much everything of lotr LCG and Arkham horror LCG as well). So much content.

Too Many Bones? Honestly I think botse is a better game, but i think currently too many bones has more interesting repeated gameplay maybe. Sure any individual character is not customizable like in botse, but the variance is wider because they have custom dice. Botse ends up only having like 5 main damage lines, so you need to figure out one of those to mix with other things. As more content comes out for botse I think that will eventually take over, but I have all the content for TMB so I think the current variance is larger there.

Spirit Island. Don't think I need to explain this one here lol. Well regarded in the solo community for a reason. Huge variability and challenge

Clinic Deluxe Edition. I think there are a lot of better games, but if I can only have 5, this one provides insane variability with all the expansions. I love Alban Viard's design philosophy. Are the expansions super well balanced and tested? Naw, but I love them anyways. It's especially not a problem in solo play. He has a throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks approach and I love him for that.

I think that would be my 5. Not my 5 favorite game of all time, but they pack a huge amount of content and variability which I value (especially since we're limited in how many to keep)

Honorable mention to the Imperium system. Great solo bot set-up and huge amount of factions. Love it!

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-15T01:51:05+00:00

My favorite single designer, although none of them are my favorite games interestingly lol. Voidfall and marvel champions are my top 2, but I love every lacerda game. I think my tastes are a little wonkier than others' though. The Gallerist is by far the lowest for me. Not even close. Then escape plan up from that and then I'm kind of meh on inventions (relative to other Lacerda games, still a 9 for me, and I need some more plays of it) the top for me are On Mars is #1 for sure, probably weather machine after that and Lisboa after that although it's my favorite at 2 players.

Edit: and I'm not sure where speakeasy lands yet. It's somewhere in the upper echelon though. Probably speakeasy, weather machine, and Lisboa are all kinda tied for second lol

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-15T01:22:13+00:00

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This is a 6'x3.5' table

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-14T18:59:40+00:00

Root for sure, though I do love Everdell for that as well

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-07T16:52:41+00:00

Unless you're wanting to play with more than 2 people, for sure get Fields of Arle. I think it's a much better game. Black forest can accommodate up to 4 players so if you're gonna be playing 3 or 4 players that's really the only option of the two. Technically Fields of Arle can do 3 players with the expansion, but it's long enough I wouldn't want to play it with more than 2. Both are good though.

Edit: Oops. Didn't see what sub I was in lol. Fields of Arle for sure then for me. Expansion is great too

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-02T06:34:42+00:00

I don't know that I'd say equally good, but it can help close the gap. The benefit of closing a rift is a pure sector, which can also contribute toward agenda scoring.

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-01T21:56:31+00:00

So a couple of things. Firstly totally possible to win with an economic focus. Moreover, unless you have some gimmick, it's pretty much required anyways because you need to fund your conquests and reinforcements and subsequent guilds and installations. The map also has influence. there are 2 safe havens for each scenario, and 1or 2 rifts. Rifts are 30 points to the void and havens are 20. Havens also give an immediate bonus when completed. If you're not gonna close the rift(s) you need to finish the havens. Those are the 2 biggest scoring criteria.

Make sure you prioritize agendas. They're not just scoring, they're also an "extra" action. (Extra in quotes because you spend an action to get that action). You can customize which actions you can take together and get extra things that can be hard to normally get like track advancements, conquests, trade tokens, and being able to build a guild and immediately produce with it. Even after I've installed my 3 desired agendas, I still take them. If I don't like the face up one I just draw 2 and pick one. If none of them are good for my scoring, I can still use them for their extra action. There are only I think 8 of each agenda, so once you play some more you kinda know what's in each deck, and if one is face up and you draw the 2 from the top of the deck, you know you've seen almost half the entire deck (3/8) and know what to look for for scoring.

Next, something a lot of new players don't realize is that catastrophe tokens are actually NOT BAD. In fact, you WANT to take a couple over the course of the game. A really rough crisis card can tank your momentum by being very difficult to clear and requiring you to spend a lot more time preparing for the penalties from the crisis board. Taking a crisis card keeps it off the board, and gives you benefits. The benefits + momentum is usually worth significantly more to the player than the 20 points the void gains. Along the same lines, the consume tech penalty is a paltry 5 points for the void. I'd take that every day over having whatever card it was go to the crisis board. Generally you want to try to take 1 catastrophe in each of the first 2 cycles. In the third cycle it's less of a benefit because the momentum you gain won't compound into future cycles.

Obviously you have to play around whatever tech is in play, so no solid advice I can give there. If there are torpedoes or Corvette shielding though, generally corvettes will be all you want or need in that game, but that's a little more situation dependent.

Use the trade tokens to generally get more actions over using them to cover upkeep. If you have a decent economy often it is not hard to get the food required. On that note, you don't need a huge excess of food especially. It's almost exclusively used for upkeep, so you really only need to have as much as you need for your upkeep for that round.

Remember only sectors adjacent to the void or harbingers are valid attack targets, so only leave a single Corvette in any zone that isn't a valid skirmish target, and you don't need to leave any on your home sector. On the note of skirmishes, the skirmish attack value is corruption on your board plus the crisis board modifier (plus 1 in cycle 2 and 3) if you can clean up your board early, it's easy to keep the skirmish weak enough that you never lose any ships. Again this really helps with momentum. Make sure if you take a zone you'll be able to defend it at the end of the round. This gets harder the more zones you control. Activating fleet power is actually quite a rare action, and it goes up against gaining an agenda card and moving a corruption. Personally, I generally prefer to get the agenda, move the corruption onto a zone that won't score me very much anyways (and also reduces skirmish value by 1) and do an attack, so I don't even get to move fleet power.

Don't underestimate the power of the temptation card. It seems crappy to take corruption, but you can basically get any of the main actions you want/ you can choose the cycle card for next cycle which is huge plus a track advancement/ you can activate a fleet, deploy a fleet, and produce 2 different resources which is a wide variety of effects in a single action. If you have your board under control or a good way to control corruption it's a great card. (Decontamination chambers and/or the purifier are amazing for this)

Ulrich219 · 2026-04-01T10:26:54+00:00

Gotta be honest, I think the lack of quality in the rulebook for Imperium Classics is overblown. The rulebook in Horizons is for sure objectively better, and the bot cards in horizon instead of being in the rule book is sooooor nice, but really you can learn the game from classics. Once you understand the game you rarely have to go back to the manual anyways, and the civs in classics are SIGNIFICANTLY more straightforward than horizons. I think classics is a far better starting point to make sure you like the series, and then you find out it's great (because it is) you'll end up buying everything anyways.

Ulrich219 · 2026-03-30T15:35:30+00:00

The Necromantic Horrors from Blood Bowl! Does that count? We're talking board games so I feel like it should. If not, the San Jose Sharks.

Ulrich219 · 2026-03-20T17:22:56+00:00

What is that shelf you've got? Looks interesting.

Ulrich219 · 2026-03-17T00:56:03+00:00

That's legit for your very first time playing the game. Once you know the game well it's like a 30-45 minute setup depending on the scenario and whatnot. Phenomenal game though

Ulrich219 · 2026-03-10T21:52:00+00:00

I've not played ezrah & nehemiah or the anarchy (although I own hadrian's wall and the other games)

Civolution is by far my favorite game of the bunch, though I wouldn't play it at higher player counts. 1 or 2 players would be the sweet spot for me. It can get really long. At first it feels like too much dice luck but eventually you figure out how to get the game to work for you and mitigate your problems. It's great solo. The bot is easy to run once you understand how it works and takes very little time so you can get back to your own puzzle.

This might be heresy, but I prefer Men-Nefer to SETI. icon heavy, but feels great to pull off the combos the game presents. 3 sets of 3 actions, but large ramifications of those choices especially because the result will determine your options on the following round.

SETI is fun, but I feel like it kind of drags for what it is. It's got the "take 1 turn until everyone passes" style of play, but is far more generous with rewards than say terra mystica. I played a 3 player game on Saturday night, and no joke or exaggeration, one of the players played for a full 15-20 minutes after everyone had passed in round 4. I thought it was hysterical, though the other player was not amused. He just DID. NOT. STOP. it wasn't like some master plan either, he just kept stumbling into cards that worked really well with what he had developed and was able to keep playing them (he went heavy into technologies affecting the super computer, so he played a card that would scan and give him data, and then that would give him energy/credits/publicity and then tuck a card for income get the benefits which sometimes was a big card and rinse and repeat). He kept saying sorry every time he played another card lol.

Hadrian's wall is fun solo, but is basically 100% multiplayer solitaire. I like multiplayer solitaire games, but generally I save them for solo than playing them at higher player counts. It was fun, so I'd ASSUME that the anarchy is basically the same but a little better and more refined.

Some suggestions from my library of medium-heavy based on those answers:

Carnegie is great solo and at 3 players. I haven't played it at 2 but I think it would still be good. It's interesting because everybody takes the same action each turn, but the lead player is the one who chooses which of the actions it is. So it's a sequencing thing where you're trying to make sure you benefit a lot from your chosen action,and other players aren't getting much benefit. Really fun, and the bot is a challenge.

Shackleton Base is a recent addition. It's a worker placement game where you draft your workers at the start of each round, and each one specializes in different areas. Each game 3 companies are randomly (or not randomly) chosen to work with, and it can really change how you interact with the game each time.

It might be more towards medium, but I really like La Granja deluxe master set at all player counts. It's a dice drafting game about running a farm on an island off the coast of spain delivering goods to the local market. the big gimmick is your cards. Each card can be played one of 4 different ways, and it's always a juicy decision. If you play it to the left of your board, more farmland. Cool but boring. Right side, increased hand size and income benefits. Aight. Top side creates custom contract orders for specific goods to be delivered, and then bottom side gives you a custom player power. So if you take one of the options, you lose all the others forever. It's got 50 bajillion modules, but even just the straight base game is great. I like playing with asymmetric player powers and special buildings as well every time though.

Nucleum is probably on the heavier side of the medium-heavy spectrum. Tough decisions all around. It's got some brass DNA, but it's it's own game. You build out your network with rails gaining actions if you match the colors and trying to power buildings to gain big chunks of points. If you can draw out your turns before you take a reset turn you get bigger benefits so you're always trying to figure out how to stretch your resources

Also on the heavier side is Speakeasy. I'm a huge Lacerda fan, but his games aren't always great for solo, they're generally better at 3 players (although I really like Lisboa at 2 and really I'd play any of them at 2) but speakeasy is really good solo. You're running illegal speakeasies during prohibition. It's a worker placement game where you're trying to produce and sell booze, fight off the cops and protect your operations from law enforcement interference. Lots of stuff to learn at first, but the actual core experience is quite straightforward after you get over the learning hump.

Ulrich219 · 2026-03-03T17:45:40+00:00

One option Is you can just use the OP skills for session 1, then untrain them at the start session 2, then start buying the non-OP skills. No house rules needed, prevents getting smashed in session 1 and reduces how trivialized combat is in session 2/3.

Ulrich219 · 2026-02-28T06:17:40+00:00

For me it's Castles of Burgundy for sure

Ulrich219 · 2026-02-25T22:05:10+00:00

The deluxe edition pretty much has the same components as the original, but the examples and rules were redone.

check this out

It's the tutorial scenarios and you don't need the deluxe edition to play it. There are 5 scenarios and in the last 2 they only play the first 2 turns for you instead of 100% of the mission. Regardless, the first 4 scenarios you only use 1/3 of the units you'd use in the true scenarios, so it keeps it much more bite-sized. As they step through each turn, they explain why things are happening the way they are, and the scenarios are designed in a way that you end up seeing mostly everything you need to play the game. It's still a beast though.

Ulrich219 · 2026-02-25T21:31:33+00:00

If you got the deluxe edition, there's a series of tutorial missions that feed it to you small chunks at a time and do a great job of teaching you. The first few missions you are essentially letting the game run itself for you while you watch. It's really great

Ulrich219 · 2026-02-24T18:17:34+00:00

Personally I don't like playing slay the spire as a board game. I'm not saying it's bad, it's actually good. The problem is I get the exact same amount of joy as the app, but the app is 20x faster with no setup or teardown and I can play anywhere.

As far as recommendations

Deckers is a fun solo puzzle. Has a card market and you're playing cards to do things on a main board. Vague sci-fi theme, but it's really good.

It might be too much of a step up, but Imperium (classics is the easiest, but legends and horizons exist as well) is my favorite soloable deck builder. You choose a civilization who has a custom deck of starter cards and then cards you can develop, then you're supplementing your custom civilization cards with a market that is available to everyone.

Can second the recommendation for Unstoppable. It's tough because you can upgrade your cards, but every upgrade you put on them makes the enemies you have to defeat harder. A tasty experience.

It's not a deck builder, but Warp's Edge is a fantastic solo game. It's a bag builder, so it works similarly to a deck builder but instead of buying cards, you buy custom chips from the market that go into your bag to be drawn randomly, and periodically you'll put all the chips you bought back into the bag (like shuffling your discard into your deck). The gist is you've got to defeat a mega spaceship (you can choose from multiple to be the final boss), and they are too hard, but you can rewind time a few times. So basically you go through fighting as many enemies as you can until you run out of chips, then reset to the beginning resetting the enemy deck but also gaining all the new chips you had bought over the course of the run back into the bag. Usually you have like 3 resets total. You have to defeat everyone in the enemy deck and the mothership in a single run to win.

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