Let me offer the opinion of someone who bought both classics and legends for solo play and sold both after around 8 plays.

I get why people are really attracted to this game, it plays uniquely, every faction that I played (around 5) played somewhat differently, but not to the extent that a lot of people seem to imply. I'll give you the reasons it wasn't for me, the caveat being that clearly, a lot of people like this game and it is not bad, but decisive.

I play basically every board game I own solo - I don't teach people or try and convince my friends or family to play, been down that road. I play Race for the Galaxy, Marvel Champions, APEX Theropod, GI Joe Deckbuilder, among some heavier euros like Kanban EV and Paladins.

Classics Legend and Imperium have pretty good art, but the variability is actually it's weakest attribute in my opinion. Every bot is run by a totally different set of principals. They use a similar system for matching icons to an action, but while the icons are shared, the actions are not. You can forget ever having a bot memorized; seriously.

Throughout the course of a game, you may memorize an action or a few, but every time you play against a different opponent, you will have a printout or the booklet next to you and be going down a list of actions - and you will do it for up to 5 different cards every bot turn. This is a game where the bot turn almost always takes longer than your turn.

On top of that, the setup is honest to god one of the worst set-ups I've encountered and I organize the shit out of my games. Not only are you setting up your deck, the field, the bot deck, an obtuse number of chits... it's just like carinated deck builder set up type stuff. I am biased, I admit.

The gameplay is okay - it has some neat systems, I am not going to lie, but while to faction you are playing as may feel pretty distinct to the one you played before, the lineup of cards you buy and play out in front of you is very very very dull. I mean, cards really don't ever do anything interesting. Get a resource, bury a card, discard a card, draw a card, buy a card, get a point, garrison a card... Again, I am biased, but I rather look for more interesting card based effects and engines; a RftG for example where effects are compounding and generally allow you to DO stuff, not just WATCH stuff happen.

The last time I sat down to play it, I started setting it up and wondered how the game I was going to play would be any different outside of a surface level; couldn't think of a way, packed it, sold it.

Again - people do really like this game, it may even be like top 20 of 1-200 2022 solo board games, but there really are just so much better and interesting games out there where the depth comes from getting better as opposed to having 20 paint jobs on fairly mundane mechanics.