I own a handful of games with genuinely well-regarded solo modes and I have played maybe two solo games total in my life, both under duress, both on a rain day with nobody else in the trailer. People assume it’s a time thing, that I’m just too busy on the road to set up a two-player automa match on my own, and for a while that’s the answer I gave because it was easier than the real one.
The real one is that games are, for me, entirely a way of being around people I like without having to talk about anything specific. Ray and I have worked the same crew for years and there are entire categories of things we don’t discuss, don’t need to, but two hours across a Dominion table with him says something a conversation never quite manages to. Solo mode removes the one part of the hobby that actually does anything for me. The automa doesn’t care if I made a good move. Ray does, a little, even if neither of us would ever say so out loud.
I tried to talk myself out of this for a while, told myself I was being precious about it, that a well-designed solo bot is a legitimate experience on its own terms and I should give it a fair shot before writing it off. Gave Arnak’s solo variant an honest try on a slow Tuesday. It was fine. Competently designed, genuinely. And I felt nothing, which surprised me more than it should have given everything I just said.
I don’t think this makes me right and the people who love solo gaming wrong, to be clear, plenty of people get something real out of it that I’m apparently just not built to get. It just clarified something about why I do this at all, which isn’t really about the games in the abstract, it’s about who’s sitting across the folding table when the rain’s coming down on the trailer roof and nobody’s going anywhere for a few hours.
That’s most of why the reviews on here always mention who I played something with. It’s not filler. It’s usually the actual point.