I am frustrated that Forbidden Games is not currently planning to update the automata to include the expansion components – and I’ve made my frustration known both on BGG and in reaching out to the company. The solo bot (by noted solo mode designer, David Turczi) can be adjusted for difficulty and for “personality” – which means I’ve won some of my games and lost others… but I’ve always had a wonderful time. There isn’t a direct combat system – as your primary objective is influence across the various countries of the Mediterranean. My copy of the Colossal Edition of Mosaic just arrived right after Christmas – and I’ve immensely enjoyed both my multiplayer and my solo plays of this 90-120 minute civilization building game. Mosaic: A Story of Civilization (8 plays – approx. The production is very nice – including an excellent box insert that stores the game between plays of a campaign. Seven games into a “real” campaign, I’ve had four wins and two very close losses… plus a loss so stunningly stupid all I could do was maximize campaign goals before I succumbed, so I think I better understand how to analyze the peril that I am in at any particular time in the game. So far, I limped through three “learning” games (being defeated each time) and decided to re-start the campaign with those lessons under my belt. Moreover, Legacy of Yu is a campaign game that uses a drip of story cards and a paragraph book to tell a compelling story – and where your actions can have effects that last multiple games. Legacy of Yu is solo-only resource management game where you, as the titular character, are working to build canals and fend off the barbarians as you wisely use the villagers to accomplish these tasks. There’s also an excellent implementation of it on BoardGameArena. I reviewed the original game – sans expansion – here on the OG. (Campaigns consist of 4 games – which explains the longer playing time noted above.) The solo system works brilliantly, btw – so far, I’ve managed to beat the first four campaigns but am stymied by the fifth. Tom managed to add start worlds and goals to Jump Drive (along with a few more cards to make it playable by 5 players)… and in one of the classier moves I’ve seen in a while, brought in the gentleman on BGG (Eric Kaminsky) who’d designed a solo campaign system for the game and used it! Thankfully, no games were harmed in the making of this expansion. Jump Drive is the quickest member of the Race for the Galaxy family of games and certainly the most self-contained… so I was somewhat surprised to hear that designer Tom Lehmann had created an expansion. Yes, it’s a ridiculously long post – you can read the whole thing OR you can simply use it as a guide for finding solo games you might be interested to try. (Note: this is not necessarily how much I like a particular game for solo play – for example, I think Terraforming Mars is an excellent solo game design but I only played it once as a solo game in 2023.) So, what follows are my thoughts on the fifty-nine (59!) different solo games I played in 2023 – ordered by the number of times I’ve played them. (A bit of perspective: I had 849 plays of 293 different games in 2023.) Solo gaming is now a decent-sized chunk of my gaming experiences – while I still play a lot of games with friends and family, 20% of my gaming in 2023 was solo. This new era of well-designed automata and solo modes for multiplayer games, coupled with excellent new solo game designs, is actually quite heartening to someone (me!) who finds something really satisfying about physically playing a game: shuffling cards, moving pieces, seeing it all spread out in front of you. There were actual solo games that saw a lot of play during that time as well: Chainsaw Warrior (Games Workshop), Ambush! & Mosby’s Raiders (Victory Games), RAF (West End Games), Voyage of the BSM Pandora (SPI), and B-17 (Avalon Hill). While one of my good friends was happy to play Squad Leader and Panzerblitz and Wooden Ships & Iron Men, most of my wargaming time was spent playing against myself – choosing actions and rolling dice for both sides of the conflict. and, for a short while, Ares (SPI’s magazine that included a sci-fi or fantasy game in each issue). At different points, I had a subscription to both The General (Avalon Hill’s magazine) and Strategy & Tactics (SPI’s magazine that included a wargame in each issue)…. In junior high & high school (1977-1982), I played a lot of wargames. But my solo gaming started a lot farther back than that. I’ve been writing these solo gaming reports since March of 2020… yes, early on in the pandemic.
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