One guy’s headache is another guy’s solo game… What makes it interesting or even possible to play a war board game designed for more than one player solo? I used to think that I knew that, but now I am not quite so sure. When I started playing board war games I played almost all the games I bought solo, in between sessions with friends. Then as the number of games grew, I began to prefer two-player games that had no or few hidden mechanisms. That is games or scenarios (in the case of Squad Leader/ASL), without hidden initial placement, minefields, hidden movement, pre-plotted fire etc. There are ways of handling these for solo players, but I did not want to take the time to do it properly. Later I began to focus on games where you were not only playing against another side, but also against the system, such as card driven games. In other words, games where you still could be surprised, even though you were playing both sides. Except for the early years where every game that crossed my doorstep was played solo, including Diplomacy, I have mostly avoided multiplayer games. This includes games that can be played ‘by from 2-5 players’, where the game really only functions well when played by more than 2 players. Such games often need the political/diplomatic angle to be enjoyed fully. They work great as multiplayer games where you can make and break alliances. But it can be hard work stabbing oneself. You can set up matrixes of relationships etc. and use die rolls to determine what is going on, but I tend not to do so. So even though I picked them up, I never got around playing multiplayer games like Britannia and Republic of Rome. Staying mostly with 2 player war games as I found them best for soloing. But I have now found that this is not so for everyone (surprise). I read an article by Charles E. Duke in the Boardgamer magazine (vol 6, number 1). (For those of you that have not come across it, the Boardgamer is an American magazine covering Avalon Hill boardgames, conventions and AHIKS, published by Bruce Monnin http://www.bright.net/~monninb/. There are 4 issues per volume and they are in their 9th vol. Besides the stuff about conventions and AHIKS/postal play, there have been a lot of scenarios and variants for Avalon Hill (AH) games. Some of the later issues have even included new counters (though you have to mount them). Bruce Monnin has also published some great collections of materials about games like 1776, PanzerBlitz and PanzerLeader. If you are interested in AH games you should take a look.) The article was about which AH games the author finds work well for solo play. The author classes a lot of the games quite differently from what I would have thought. Classed as Very High (solitaire playability) are multiplayer games like Britannia, Maharaja and Republic of Rome. Except for knowing what is on the other players mind, they should contain no hidden elements. I have the games, but without studying them, I have classed them as difficult to solo. But I will now try them out. And who knows, that might have opened up a whole new group of games for solo gaming. On the other hand, there are games that he classifies as Not Suitable, which I am very fond of playing solo. That is card driven games like We the People and Hannibal. As I wrote in an earlier issue of Lone Warrior, I think these are great for solo play. There are also games that he classifies as having a Low Suitability that I like to solo. Like Air Force / Dauntless and Wooden Ship & Iron Men. They are classified as Low due to the simultaneous movement plotting. I find that splitting the movement plot into segments works just fine. And some naval war games with simultaneous plotting have this method in their rules, as an alternative way to handle movement. There are games that we agree on are hard to solo. Like Flat Top where much of the game is based on hidden forces searching for each other. But again they are not impossible to solo, at least not all of the scenarios. Though it might take some extra work, preparing search plans for each side etc. If the game has a scenario where only one of the sides is moving hidden, I have had some good solo games. For each turn I plan the search patterns for the non-hidden side. Trying to cover as much space as possible. Then I move the hidden side, trying to avoid the search pattern as far as possible. So returning to the title. Maybe all games are playable solo? Probably not, but if you come across a game that looks difficult to solo, you can always have a look around. It might be that someone else thinks it is a good solo game, or they think it only needs a little tweaking to work. 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