When I was young and single I wargamed and roleplayed every weekend and sometimes during the week too. However, now I have small children, I find the time and space I can dedicate to wargaming somewhat limited. I still enjoy setting up a table and shoving some figures around, but it is often quicker and easier to set up a boardgame (not to mention dismantling it when someone else wants the dining-room table). So, I thought I’d share with you my list of some of the games I play solo in the hope that it might inspire someone to try a game they might not have thought of before.
The games listed below are not in order or preference.
B17 Queen of the Skies (Avalon Hill) is arguably the best dedicated solo game available. In it you control a single B17 bomber and its crew in daylight bombing raids over Europe during WWII. Your primary objective is to survive the bombing raid, preferably getting a decent percentage of your bombs on target, but you are also trying to survive for 25 missions to complete your tour of duty.
Game play is driven by random dice rolls on a series of game tables, covering everything from the weather to the types of German aircraft attacking you. Luck (in the form of dice rolls) plays a very large part in how the game pans out for you, with very few tactical decisions open to you. As you take battle damage, you do get involved in deciding how the remaining crew fight their positions in the bomber, but essentially you are tied in to a metal box on a set course and you have as few choices as the real-life crews. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as B17 Queen of the Skies is a curiously compulsive game – I’ve owned my copy for over 15 years and it continues to be one of my favourites.
Patton’s Best (Victory Games) is also a dedicated solo game in much the same vein as B17 Queen of the Skies. In it, you control the crew of a single Sherman tank during the Northwest Europe campaign from D-Day to the end of the war. Patton’s best is more suited to campaign play than to individual games because the individual days actions begin to run together after a while.
Patton’s Best uses dice rolls and tables in much the same way as B17 Queen of the Skies, but you do have more tactical control over your actions as the game unfolds. Unlike in B17, you have an area of countryside to clear and you have a series of options as to how you approach that task. Sometimes you have artillery or airpower to call on, but mostly you are left to your own resources. However, you do have different types of ammunition, as well as the ability to carry extra. As you progress through the campaign, you can upgrade your tank from the basic Sherman to any one of 18 different variants, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Tunnels & Trolls (Flying Buffalo) is one of the earliest roleplaying games, dating from the mid-1970s. Like all roleplaying games, it does not easily lend itself to solo play, but over 30 solo scenario booklets (of the select a paragraph style which later became popular with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks) were published and they remain classics of their type. Some of them have limited replay value, with only a few routes through the books, but some of them (such as the gladiatorial one) are random enough to make them endlessly replayable. Where the Tunnels & Trolls books score over the Fighting Fantasy series is in character advancement: you can play the same character through different game books because of the underlying rules – indeed some of the adventures require your character to be at a certain level, or a certain number of combat adds, before you can play it. Not one for wargamers perhaps, but I still enjoy them.
Pendragon (Chaosium/Green Knight) is the other roleplaying game in this list. Pendragon is set in the Arthurian legends of Malory and Cretien de Troyes, where heavily armoured knights compete in war and romance for the ideals of chivalry and the chance of glory. In addition, because each adventure is essentially a year’s work for the player knight, time passes quickly and the character is encouraged to ambitions of family, so that there is someone to carry on your name and glory. All this is set against the backdrop of the Arthurian saga, from the sword in the stone to the final reckoning at Camlann.
Although Pendragon does include some solo scenarios, they are particularly limited and not suitable for prolonged play. However, each Pendragon character has a series of traits and passions which define their values and their instinctive reactions in set situations. These traits and passions are almost constantly tested during game play and any character who goes against their nature too much will gradually force their traits and passions score to reflect their play. Thus, the traits and passions system gives the solo player a good idea of how the knight might react in a given situation, but with a slight chance of acting out of character.
I said once before (Lone Warrior 117, I think) that roleplaying is just skirmish wargaming taken to its ultimate conclusion and this is how I play Pendragon solo, keeping a game diary of my character’s adventures over the years.
Paydirt (Avalon Hill) is an American Football game, allowing you to play real NFL teams in a slightly stylised version of the game with a limited number of plays available to you. Available from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, with new team charts each year it was issued (I have the 1987 version) but the same rules. In the last few years it was issued, it included a rudimentary solo chart for randomising defense plays, based upon the situation in the game at the time, but if you have any knowledge of American football, it isn’t difficult to work out the most common defensive options in any given situation.
Avalon Hill also put out a college football version called Bowl Bound, which used essentially the same rules, but had less appeal in the UK due to the very limited coverage of college football. Both games are out of print but fairly widely available second hand. Expect to pay around £10 for Paydirt and a little more for Bowl Bound, which was not so widely available in the UK.
I think that Arnhem (SPI) is the best of the Westwall Quad games from SPI. It covers the events of operation Market Garden over the areas covered by the US and British para units, from the initial paradrops on the 17th September to the end of the action. It isn’t a big game, perhaps 200 counters in all, but the three scenarios allow you to explore the campaign as it unfolded, trying to do better than the real-life participants, or to follow your own plan, placing the drop zones as you see fit. One thing doesn’t change though – XXX Corps still has that single road to fight down and, ultimately, that has a big effect on the outcome.
Arnhem isn’t a solo game, and it doesn’t include any solo rules, but the initial placements and the reinforcement schedules are simple enough that the game can be played relatively easily by one person. The Germans have two main problems – to bring enough forces to bear in any one area to disrupt the paras and/or the XXX Corps advance, and to neutralise the paras in Arnhem (bridge demolition, although a German task, is actually the function of a die roll and therefore outside the German player’s control). The allied forces have too much to do with the forces available to them and they must constantly re-prioritise their tasks as the game progresses.
It is just possible to get elements of XXX Corps across the Rhine in the ten turns allowed in the game. I have occasionally managed to get the infantry across, but you have to work very hard to achieve it.
SPI has been out of business for over twenty years now, but Arnhem is widely available on the second-hand market and is well worth seeking out if the Second World War is one of your interests. Prices vary, but the individual game is much more commonly available (and therefore much cheaper) than the Westwall Quad game. If possible, try to get hold of the later reissue of Arnhem, which includes a separate ‘Introduction to Wargames’ sheet, designers notes and play hints.
The Awful Green Things from Outer Space (Steve Jackson Games) has rarely been out of print since its debut in Dragon magazine in the late 1970s. The latest version, released this winter, adds some extra rules and new artwork, but it is essentially the same game it always was. Written by Tom Wham and illustrated in his own eccentric style, it deals with the crew of the starship Znutar and their efforts to survive the awful green things which replicate practically endlessly and threaten to overwhelm the crew.
Awful Green Things is another two-player game and, again, it has no solo rules, but this doesn’t really matter. The actions of the awful green things themselves is generally obvious, allowing you to play the crew in their frantic attempts to survive (and, if possible, save the ship).
Formula De (Euro Games) is a formula one racing car game designed for up to ten players. The actual game play is very simple: cars have six gears and each gear uses a different sized dice - from D4 for first gear up to D30 for sixth gear – while the tracks have squares which regulate how far the cars can move. The dice are special ones with limited number ranges, so the D30 has 21-30 three times for example. Thus, you get some idea of roughly how far your car is going to move in each turn, but not exactly. In addition, each turn on the track has a number, from 1 to 3, which is the number of times your car must stop in the turn or crash because they are going too fast.
Formula De is not designed for solo play, but you can play it as such quite easily. The cars which come with the set are stylised racing cars in coloured plastic. Even the most rabid formula one fan cannot directly identify any car with an individual driver or team, making it very difficult to apply favouritism. You can paint them up in the various team colours, I suppose, but the fun of Formula De is racing on the real formula one tracks (32 tracks are currently available, reflecting most of the formula one tracks which were in use in the late nineties – some have since changed in the real world, but have not yet been updated in the game – you get two tracks with the boxed game and can buy the others separately in packs of two or four).
Tactically, Formula De is a very interesting game, with the skill of selecting the best gear for each part of the track being balanced by the randomness in the die rolls. More than once I’ve gone into a corner in a high gear, only to roll low and wind up one or two squares short of the corner, forcing me to crash down the gears and watch the other cars zip right by me.
Zombies (Journeyman Press) is a good, fun little game based on the zombie movie genre. The object of the game is to get from the centre of town to the helipad through the hordes of zombies before anyone else. The game starts with only the town centre tile and, each turn, another tile is placed to make up more of the town (the helipad is always placed last). Each tile has a set number of zombies that begin on that tile and D6 zombies move one square each at the end of each player turn.
Physically, Zombies is an attractive game. The tiles show different parts of a rain-soaked town at night-time, but the best part of the game are the tokens – 100 plastic zombie figures and 6 player figures, all roughly 20mm in height.
Zombies is not designed as a solo game but again, like Formula De, the player pieces are stylised figures in primary colours and it is possible to play all of them without favouritism.
Finally, I’ve recently come a copy of one of the first games I ever played and I’d like to play it solo if I can, but so far I’ve not worked out an effective way of doing so. The game is Panzerblitz from Avalon Hill. So if anyone out there has any ideas, I’d be grateful.
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