I’ve been writing these solo gaming reports since March of 2020… but my solo gaming started a lot farther back than that – being a wargamer in the 1970s/80s meant that a lot of your collection only saw table time if you played against yourself – choosing actions and rolling dice for both sides of the conflict. There were some actual solo games (Chainsaw Warrior, Ambush!, Mosby’s Raiders, RAF, etc.) – but the new era of well-designed automata and solo modes for multiplayer games was still a decade or two away.

Solo gaming is now a decent-sized chunk of my gaming experiences – while I still play a lot of games with friends and family, nearly 24% of my gaming in the first eight months of 2024 was solo. For comparison, the yearly total for 2023 was 20%, 2022 was 22%, 2021 was 33%, 2020 was 19%, and 2019 was 6%.

So, what follows are my thoughts on the eighty-one (81!) different solo games I played in 2024 – ordered by the number of times I’ve played them. (Note: this is not necessarily how much I like a particular game for solo play – for example, I think Nemo’s War is an excellent solo game design but I didn’t play it at all in 2024. It’s also not a measure of how much I enjoy a game as a multi-player experience – another example: I think the solo mode for Rome & Roll is not very enjoyable – but I like it a lot as a 2-3 player game.)

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. I’m good either way.

Dimes

Wild Tiled West (13 plays – approx. playing time: 35 minutes)

Despite my enjoyment of Wild Tiled West, it didn’t end up on my Best New (to Me!) lists for 2024 because I’d played it originally in 2023 as a multi-player game. And that first play of Wild Tiled West was just OK – but when I found a deal for a copy, I went ahead and picked it up since I tend to like Paul Dennen’s designs. And it turns out that it’s a really sweet solo game… made even more playable with the excellent Dire Wolf Studios app and the solo campaign (which I’ve played through twice now).

New Frontiers (11 plays – approx. playing time: 30 minutes)

The Starry Rift expansion for Tom Lehmann’s board game in the Race for the Galaxy universe utilizes a similar solo system to Tom’s Jump Drive – where solo players must complete a variety of goals over multiple games to win the campaign. I’ve tried the simplest campaign four times: twice on “short” mode (1 win & 1 loss) and twice on “long” mode (I lost both times). It sounds like a lot (4 games in order to get a “win”?!), but in practice the games move quickly and it’s an easy game to reset.