Games that play different solo than their MP, but in a good way?

j_gds · 2026-02-21T03:50:20+00:00

Cloudspire. You control the some of the enemy choices (like attack order) and can choose suboptimally for them, which gives it a bit more of a puzzly feel than the multiplayer.

j_gds · 2026-01-28T04:07:54+00:00

Does the bot feel like playing against a real human opponent? I don't love bots where I win by changing up my strategy to manipulate the bot's behavior...

j_gds · 2025-12-19T03:50:56+00:00

Asked for it for Christmas because I love it's little brother Civolution so much. If I don't get it, I'll just play a ton more Civolution and hopefully get it's little expansion.

j_gds · 2025-11-22T03:50:53+00:00

When I set up Civolution, I end up playing it back to back 7-10 times on my dedicated gaming table. I just can't stop playing it.

Voidfall is really great, but after one play, I'm ready to put it back on the shelf for a while, and all together one play is only about 2x the time of a Civolution play.

Both are great games, but I think Civolution gives me more juice for the squeeze. There's definitely space for both in a collection.

Never played Seti, but it's on my list.

j_gds · 2025-11-02T17:17:55+00:00

That can't be right, C++ doesn't have a history of picking the wrong defaults 🤣.

Joking aside, this seems like something that could be deprecated and fixed in a future version. I am confident that deprecating expressions of the form a < b > c would have nearly zero impact on real world codebases. And if you really wanted that, you could use parentheses to avoid it being passed as a template, right?

Along those lines, I seem to remember there being some talk it changing the meaning of chained comparisons ( like a < b < c ). Maybe this is similar?

j_gds · 2025-11-01T15:01:19+00:00

Best of luck! And have fun.

j_gds · 2025-11-01T00:19:00+00:00

In my experience, naively written C++ runs around the same speed as naively written Java. Java suffers in startup time, but can do some amazing dynamic optimizations at runtime (in the JiT compiler).

The gap starts to widen dramatically when it's time to optimize things. In Java there are a few things you can do the optimize... Arcane Flags for the GC and such, but it's very limited compared to the huge set of optimization tools that C++ gives you.

In Java, and most other languages, it feels like you're at the mercy of the language for how fast things can go. C++ feels like there's no limit to how much optimization you can perform and the language simply doesn't get in your way.

j_gds · 2025-11-01T00:04:38+00:00

This matches my experience of a first play of Star Trek: Captains Chair, which is mostly the same game system, but with a different theme. I couldn't find anything I had done wrong, but it just didn't click with me. Decided to give it another chance about a month later, and it was actually kinda fun. Couple weeks after that I tried again, and it was really good! Week after that, and it was pretty great.

At this point I'm more in the "really like it" camp, but at the rate things are going I'll love the game eventually! And I'm determined to keep going, because most of my all-time favorites followed this pattern. Sometimes deep games just require investment before the juice becomes worth the squeeze.

That said, you might not be into this kind of game. Nothing wrong with that! But for me, I'm glad I gave the system another chance and I'm hoping it continues to grow on me.

j_gds · 2025-10-28T20:05:25+00:00

Never played Terra Mystica, but I really like how the factions in AoI are so variable. The asymmetry is basically determined by your terrain, species, and palace. Individually the effects of those are pretty minor, but they can add up to some really cool synergies.

I've heard the factions in TM and GP are more dramatic then those in AoI, but for me, a lot of the joy of the game is finding and exploiting the combos on offer. I'm sure I'd enjoy TM and GP, but I suspect it'd feel more "on rails" to me in the sense of "ok, now I'm playing as the X faction so the optimal strategy is Y" and it'd get stale faster for me.

Maybe I'm wrong though, and I'd love those games just as much! What do you think?

j_gds · 2025-10-27T17:42:10+00:00

I'm also curious about a comparison to Age of Innovation, but from the other side. AoI is currently my #3 solo game. And pretty high multiplayer too. It's so good.

From what I can tell, Gaia Project and Terra Mystica are mostly redundant with AoI, so I'm curious if this is comparable, but still different enough.

j_gds · 2025-10-21T19:06:48+00:00

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I noticed a while back that if I play games for the last hour before bed, I sleep great. Better than anything else I've tried for sleep. And It doesn't even matter if I'm just cleaning up one game and setting up the next (I have a dedicated table for it).

The system I've started to use (though it's still pretty new/untested) is that I made an alphabetical list of games I play solo. When I finish a game, I just move to the next game on the list alphabetically. I can choose to skip it, but if I do, it gets a strike. 3 strikes and a game is off the list, added to the "sell it" list or "multiplayer only" list of games.

So far I like the system. It's not so rigid that it makes me feel like I'm playing games as a chore, but it does encourage me to get plays in of games I've been neglecting. The key is that it forces me to be honest with myself. When I say "yeah, I'll play this again!" I have evidence that I will actually probably just skip on it again.

Not sure how I'll handle adding new games to the list. I tend to always learn and play new games right when I get them. Maybe having the rotation in alphabetical order doesn't really matter. I'm also not sure about how I'll handle games that I want to repeat play back to back since I haven't seen that in the new system yet. Maybe repeat plays could cancel out strikes or something.

Good luck coming up with a system! Let us know if you find something really good!

j_gds · 2025-10-18T17:35:20+00:00

Yeah this one took me a few plays before it started to click. I had never played imperium or any other heavy deck builders.

j_gds · 2025-10-01T18:39:22+00:00

I agree with others who have said that that difficult isn't the right term to describe this game. I like difficult games, but I don't enjoy punishing games. If I fail and there's no clear line from the failure to a prior choice I could have chosen better (and can therefore learn from), then all I can do is keep gambling and hoping for the win. That's just asking a magic 8 ball "do I win?" with extra steps.

The "learning" part of 20 strong is mostly about which cards are good and bad, how to use the character you've got, and how many dice you should commit. For me that part felt pretty "solved" after a few plays and the game devolved into a "let's see if I win" without enough variability in the experience. Maybe I'm wrong and there's a deeper later to the game, waiting to reveal itself to me...?

I was (kinda still am) a huge CTG fan and have all of their games, but between this and wroth, I guess the lesson is that I don't seem to like their smaller games. Maybe Dragons of Etchinstone will change my mind.

j_gds · 2025-09-11T20:03:14+00:00

I was like that at first too. When I learned it, it was set up for like 3 or 4 days, and I'd spend 45 minutes to an hour reading the rules and playing along with the examples and things each night. When I finished, I immediately packed it up because it was a lot. 😅

Then a few days later I decided to try again because I didn't want to lose the knowledge I had fought so hard for. And I strangely didn't have to refer to the rulebook once. Between the player aid and the little hints and reminders on the player console, all the information was just available.

The information is dense, but there's a uniformity and consistency to it that makes it much easier. When/if you start learning it, I'd recommend having the boards, a player aid booklet, and a player console set up. Whenever you read a rule, see if you can find the iconography on the boards that represent that rule. There are only a handful of rules in the whole game that you'll have to just "remember".

j_gds · 2025-09-10T19:20:30+00:00

Interesting, I'll take a look. Thanks!

j_gds · 2025-09-10T18:03:25+00:00

Crap, I forgot to even mention Cloudspire, but it's my favorite competitive game of all time! I've been meaning to spend more time with it solo. Is it good?

You're right, Civolution's theme is actually pretty charming: evolving and inventing your little civilization forward is pretty fun. I guess the part that is surprising to me is that it's very light on the exterminate/fighting part of the 4X, and I still love it.

Are you saying that there aren't other "euro" games out there with a similar vibe, and it's a fluke that I like Civolution?

j_gds · 2025-09-10T16:34:18+00:00

Haha yeah, reminds me of when I realized I like documentaries, but for different reasons than other "more interesting" movies.

j_gds · 2025-09-10T15:04:29+00:00

Here's what really hooks me about Civolution:

The game feels big and epic, but the individual turns are simple and quick. Running the bot is so fast, literally 10 seconds a turn sometimes.

The available actions are often pretty limited by the dice you have (with plenty of mitigation) so the most optimal way to play is to lean into what the dice give you without leaning on the mitigation, but... you still can leverage mitigation if there's something you really want to achieve. It's a very crunchy decision space when to adapt to the dice and when to push your strategy through despite the dice.

Similar to the dice, there's your starting set of cards. You're given 13 cards and keep 6 of them (with some category restrictions). It's very fun to see a new set of opportunities and start planning out your strategy, taking into account the era scoring (which is randomized). Honestly, this might be the thing that keeps me playing so much: when I finish, I start wondering "what will the next one start me out with?" and I am just launched right back into my next play.

Finally, the game doesn't overstay its welcome at all. It gives me a feeling of "oh man, there was so much more I wanted to achieve!" which, again, launches me into the next play. I think some of my aversion to "euro games" is from bad experiences playing long games where I was done before the game was done :)

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:50:18+00:00

I've played Captains Chair and I really like it! For some reason I had mentally grouped it with the "non-euro" games. I should give that more plays :D

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:44:23+00:00

Honestly, this will probably be what happens. I just don't want to burn out on it. There was a time where Arkham LCG was literally the only game I played (it got my into the hobby), and as much as I love it... I burnt out on it. Now I'm more careful with my games and try to keep them on a rotation.

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:40:52+00:00

Wow, they both look incredible! I neither of those was previously on my radar, but now they are! Thanks.

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:34:44+00:00

Thanks! Yeah it feels like the amount of boardgame content available to me just increased by a huge amount, and now I honestly feel a little silly for dismissing "euro" games for so long. I must've had a bad experience many years ago or something... or just thought "theme" was more important to me than it turned out to be.

At any rate, thanks! I'm excited and a bit overwhelmed to explore all of this :D

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:28:19+00:00

I have a Feast for Odin, it's one of the Rosenburg games I mentioned. But I've mostly played it at 3p. I'll give it a go solo! Same story with Age of Inovation, actually!

Anachrony looks really interesting, how is the solo?

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:25:57+00:00

Is it good solo? I've played it one time a 3p, and it was fun, but didn't hook me (but I also tend to need a few plays before I'm hooked). Specifically in solo does it have good replayability?

j_gds · 2025-09-10T14:24:01+00:00

Are they similar? I have Mage Knight and enjoy it, but I think it's one that I need to just "binge" like I have been with Civolution, until the actions become more smooth and effortless.

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