I enjoy solo games… and I enjoy drafting games. But turning a multiplayer drafting game into a coherent and enjoyable solo drafting game is not a simple proposition. How do you simulate the loss of choices created by the intelligent choices of other players? (Yes, I’ll stipulate that not every human opponent you face is making intelligent choices.)
In this short post, I’ll attempt to highlight a design idea and its variations that has allowed a number of very good multiplayer games to also work quite well as solo game experiences. I’ll be focusing on three excellent recent releases – Blueprints of Mad King Ludwig, Pioneer Rails, and Stonespine Architects – all three from different design teams (Ted Alspach, Jeff Allers & Matthew Dunstan, Jordy Adan) and different publishers (Bezier Games, Dranda Games, Thunderworks Games).
I’m not claiming to make an exhaustive review of the subject – the references I’ll be making to other games are those in my own personal experience.
Pack It Up!
The design idea (or mechanic/mechanism – I am just not interested in that particular niche gamer argument today on which one is “correct”) at the heart of all three solo variants of these games is packets.
No, not sugar packets or artificial sweetener packets or even packets of various gamer-friendly snacks. (Anyone up for Twizzler Bites or some Red Vines?) Packets of playing cards.
The first time I saw this mechanic was in the city-builder drafting game from 2018, NEOM (which, btw, I highly recommend). The multiplayer game uses a 7 Wonders-style draft of tiles which are then placed onto your individual city board. (To be fair, the first time I saw this style of draft was in Fairy Tale… but 7 Wonders is the game that “put drafting on the map”.)
In order to play NEOM solo, each “age” of tiles (there are three of them) is shuffled and divided into packs. After some slight shifting of tiles to make the early packs larger and the later packs smaller, the solo player picks up each pack in turn and chooses a single tile to place. There are some other small rules changes about purchasing resources and dealing with disaster tiles… but that simple structural choice maintains the drafting feel of the game while limiting your options to keep the task of building an efficient city challenging.
Wonderful Idea
It’s a Wonderful World (2019) is yet another drafting game with its own twists (the production of elements in order to “build” cards into your permanent tableau) that chose to use the packet idea to fuel the solo game. The solo player deals eight “development pools” of five cards each… and then considers each “pool” individually, playing cards as potential constructions or recycling them for resources. The player may also discard two of those cards to draw five more cards from the deck, keeping one of them. After finishing with two “pools” (aka packets), a production phase happens, thus simulating the rhythm of a multiplayer game of It’s A Wonderful World.
Again, the packet design idea helps keep the drafting “feel” of the multiplayer game while offering enough constraints to keep the solo player from cruising to an unearned victory.
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