Solo board games are a salvation from an online world
The year 2020 was an interesting one for our planet, and an incredibly boring one for me personally. By day I was working remotely from my apartment, managing one of the pop-up shelters created by the U.K. government for its unhoused population. By night I was locked away in my bedroom-come-office staring at the same few glowing screens and in desperate need of anything that might take my eyes off the news cycle. That’s when I discovered solo board gaming.
Like many who continued to work remotely through the COVID-19 pandemic, I struggled to extract joy from the same screens that caused me so much anxiety during the day. I’d always enjoyed the more social aspects of traditional board gaming, but without the ability to spend time with other people the entire hobby disappeared practically overnight. It wasn’t until several months into lockdown when hourslong walks in the park were interrupted by the cold that I first tried a solo board game. I sat at my kitchen table, a baffling array of cardboard and dice laid out before me, and found myself entranced.
Solo games have been around in some form or another for hundreds of years. Puzzles and solitaire card games are well known boredom busters, but in recent decades a micro community of passionate designers began to create games that drew from puzzles and traditional board games to make something entirely distinct.
The first solo board games emerged from the wargaming scene of the ’80s and ’90s. Seemingly inaccessible by design, these early one-player games typically centered on micromanaging units across a historically accurate setting, and their legacy lives on in titles by publishers such as Dan Verssen Games and GMT. Later on, in the 2000s, online forums helped give rise
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