Top 10 Solo Only Board Games

Almost all of these games are ones that I’ve featured on the Malts and Meeples YouTube channel. I will put out videos for all of them that I have one so you can find them all here.

10. Snowfall Over Mountains

This one is a nice and peaceful board game. Snowfall Over Mountains is a card laying game, and you will see a lot of these. You create a layout of cards that score for different types of terrain. You score rabbit tracks one way, ponds another, trees another, and so on, and this scoring can change. But you want to get as high as score as you can and that’s it for the game. It is fast, it is easy to shuffle up and play again.

9. Cursed

This one is all about trying to defeat a curse before time runs out. You need to defeat a certain number of monsters before the deck of cards runs out, or the witch gets your soul. The game play is all about pushing your luck and deciding how many cards to use to try and defeat the monsters. I like how all the cards have a few things on them. They might have special rules or treasure, but they can all be used for attacking and they are all monsters.

8. Numbsters

Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine. Yes, that is the basis for this game, and it it works. You want cards to eat each other and you want to end up with as few cards as possible. So you create a line of cards (or you can play it in your hand) and you need to use the rule at the front to eat cards, or just to eat cards that are one higher. It’s a little game, part of the Button Shy Line of games, and it works better than a lot of them for me.

7. Relics of Rajavihara

Maybe you remember the video game Chips Challenge. If you are like me, you loved that game growing up and trying to figure out every puzzle you could. Relics of Rajavihara gives you some of that same feel in a board game. You need to manipulate blocks in ways that let you get to the relic on each level. If you get stuck, you just reset the board and try again. It is one that I owned, played, sold, and now I got it back because I just want to go through them again.

6. Bargain Basement Bathysphere

This is a crazy game when it comes to board games names. But Bargain Basement Bathysphere is a fun campaign roll and write game. It is meant to be solo and it’s campaign only in the loosest terms, less of a campaign than Welcome to the Moon for example. But it’s fun to play and it’s fun to figure out how to manipulate the dice and get down to the bottom of the sea and get back out before your oxygen runs out. There is just a little bit of tension in the game, and that works well.

5. Grove/Orchard

Yes, this is two games at once on the list. But Grove and Orchard are very similar in what they do as board games. I could also add a game like Sprawlopolis to this, but I like what Grove and Orchard do better. In this game you are trying to grown the most fruit that you can. You gain fruit by overlapping cards so that matching fruit symbols cover each other. And that’s the majority of the game right there. Grove adds in some extra scoring challenges which are fun to play with as well.

4. Under Falling Skies

Have you ever wanted to play space invaders with Independence Day? For me, that is what the game Under Falling Skies feels like. At it’s core, it is a dice placement game where you want to get big numbers so you can fight the aliens, drive them back, and research how to stop them. But the higher number you use the faster the smaller alien ships descend. And if too many of them make it into the Earth’s atmosphere, well, that’s game over, man.

3. Final Girl

Final Girl is the one game on the list that I haven’t played yet on Malts and Meeples Youtube. I need to refresh myself on how to play it and then get it to the table. Though that might wait until the fall because Final Girl is all about horror. Every game you play takes you into the setting of your choice and you are the final girl. You need to survive and beat the killer or other things as you play.

And there are really a ton of different options as to what you can do. I love the mix and match nature of the horror setting your are in with the variety of final girls who you can play as. And it is all time management and resource management to try and win the game. Of course, the longer it goes, the scarier it gets. Can you find what you need, rescue others, and defeat the scenario?

2. Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom

This is the one with the most recent playthrough on Malts and Meeples. And I blame Meet Me At The Table for getting me into this game. This is a legacy game, which is a bit odd to put on the list. But it’s a game all about managing a deck of cards to build up your kingdom and get as many points as you can. I love how streamlined it is and how almost all cards throughout the game can be upgraded as well as be resources that you use to upgrade other cards. So the decision how to use a card is always a challenge.

1. For Northwood

Finally, we have For Northwood a solo only trick taking game. And you might think, like I did, I like trick taking but how is it going to work solo? Well, it is my number one, so I think that it works well solo. In the game you need to win at each grove. When you win at a grove you get access to a leader who can help you in future rounds and you get points. But it is hard because each grove needs an exact number of tricks one.

I love how the game gives you powers and abilities that you can use. Though, you are only allowed to use them once per hand of cards. So if you need to spend it early, well that might be rough if things start to go sideways. But it just works and the challenges work well as well for once you have conquered the base game.

Final Thoughts

Now I know I have a lot more solo only games that I’ve played. There are a ton of Button Shy Games like that and only one of them made the list. Why is that? I think it is because a lot of them feel similar and they are all very small games. That isn’t a bad thing because for the most part I enjoy them a lot. And I know that I have a lot more to play from littler games like Friday and Palm Island to bigger solo only games like Mr President, Hallas of Hegra, and Hoplomachus: Victorum.

Is there one of the solo only games that you want to see me highlight on the channel? Let me know that down in the comment section or over on the Nerdologists Facebook page or on the YouTube channel.

Five Solo Board Games to Play on Malts and Meeples

But what are my Top 5 solo only games that I want to get played? Well, let’s do one last final list really quickly and in no particular order.

1. 20 Strong – This looks like a fun game and it’s from Chip Theory Games, but it’s small. And you decide what setting you want to play, so it can be their new one for the game or it can be one of their existing ones.
2. Mr President – This one would be a huge undertaking and that is why I haven’t played it yet. Have you ever wanted to be the President of the United States? I honestly can say that I don’t think I have, but in this board game, you can play as them and make decisions but you need to balance everything.
3. Forage – This is going to be the easiest to get to the table. It’s in the same line as Grove and Orchard, so I should just stream this one.
4. The Ratcatcher – This is the Pied Pipers story, in some ways, in a board game. It is one where you want to catch all the rats before they get too much cheese. I’ve heard the rulebook is tough but I still want to give it a got because of the theme.
5. Hoplomachus: Victorum – The second Chip Theory Games game on the list. This one is not small and it’s a campaign. But it is a short campaign. Can I build up my troops and combat prowess to get through the whole thing?

Which one of these should I play?

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Next 5 Best Board Games of 2023

10. Ecosystem: Savana

This one is almost a bit of a cheat to put on the list. I got it in really recently and I have played it a few times. It’s more of a cheat because I knew I would like the game. I own Ecosystem and Ecosystem: Coral Reef, both of which I really like. So of course, a new version of the game I would like as well. It’d have been a surprise if I hadn’t.

Well, needless to say, I did. I think this one did some interesting things. It forces you to flip more cards down so by the end they are face down, but you still get to use them for scoring. So when you score a lion or a cheetah you flip prey cards face down. And I believe that the cheetah scores first, so it can mean that the Lion, which scores more points, isn’t able to score. The cheetah beats it to all the tasty gazelle.

9. Black Hole Buccaneers

This is one that I don’t even own. But for a game that I don’t own, I kind of wish that I did. The reason I don’t own it is that it’s a drafting game, which I love drafting games, but I own a lot of them. and Black Hole Buccaneers is a little bit more complex, which still having a light and goofy theme.

Mainly, it has a drafting element where you can be stuck with negative points just by a card that you’re given at the end. But otherwise it’s a pretty interactive drafting system. I need to know what you’re doing or what you’re taking. I can just ignore the one that I might bust on and hope it goes well anyways. And it would balance out with a lot of powers and scoring that stacks as you go along. But when it comes to drafting games, it won’t beat out others that I have already.

8. Cursed!?

Next up is a small solo game, Cursed!?. This one is a pretty simple push your luck type of game. You find that you’ve been cursed by a witch. To break the curse, you need to provide her with eight souls and quickly.

The mechanisms are basically flipping cards against monsters and seeing if your attack can add up to their health. The twist on it comes with the idea that busting is bad. You don’t want to overkill them, you just want to take them out. For each point under you are, you burn that many cards. So someone has eight health, I do six, I burn two cards. Well, if I flip and I go over, I remove the card I flipped and still burn two cards. So I burn extra cards. I like that bit of strategy to figure out when the push or not.

7. Skytear Horde

Next up a solo game that I played on Malts and Meeples, Skytear Horde. This is one that after I played it a few times, I went all in on the Gamefound campaign that happened this past year. It’s more content, which I’m not sure the game needed, but won’t be bad to have. And a better storage system for all of it.

The game itself is a horde battler. You need to wipe out a main boss, but a lot of what you’re doing is fighting against hordes. And you do that while also managing the hand of cards that you have, because you don’t get to draw new cards all that often, or all that many. So you need to set up your defenses to stop the enemy hordes while keeping enough back for what comes next.

This game can play solo or multiplayer, but I really like it as a solo game. The enemy system is simple enough that it’s fast to run and with that it makes it easier to table. It isn’t a small game or the fastest game to get originally set-up, but once it is, the game play works well and it’s easy to reset.

6. SpellBook

Finally, the best of the bottom half of my Top 10 of 2023, yeah, that’s long, is SpellBook. This one maybe could sneak into my top half with more plays. It’s an engine building spell casting game. You are learning spells so that you can cast them, and you can get each spell into your spellbook one time. Well, do you wait for the higher point scoring, better powered one, or do you hold off on it? There’s a timing and push your luck element to it.

And then there is your familiar. They should all be cats, but they aren’t, still it’s fun to play as they don’t really do anything. Your familiar is another way to score points and push for the end of the game. If you completely feed your familiar, you end the game there and all the spells cast and level of familiar are tallied up for points. Otherwise once someone has cast their final spell the game ends.

I like how you can push for the end of the game multiple ways. It isn’t just the end of the game, it’s that you can push for very different scoring. You might mainly ignore casting spells, just getting the one or few that help you add tokens to your familiar faster to push the end game that way. And there are different combinations of spells you can use, so as long as everyone has the same one, you can play around with that.

Final Thoughts

This was a fun year to play board games. I am pleased with the number of 2023 titles that I got in, and I know that I have more that I need to play. And I realized that there are two campaign games from 2023 that I hadn’t rated yet, but I’ll just leave them off as Vampire the Masquerade: Chapters and Isofarian Guard would definitely had made my Top 10, if not my Top 5. So it’s too late to go back and correct that.

So there are a lot of good board games this year and a lot of good ones that I want to play. Witcher the Old World, Earth, Thunder Road Vendetta and more all need to get played. That is some of why you’ll see a future article about how I want to work through my shelf of shame or opportunity or to be played. I just own a lot of board games that I’m excited to play, so I don’t need to buy more I need to play them.

What were some of your favorites board games from 2023?

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Cursed!?

Well, first let me say, join me on Wednesday and see if this makes the top 100 games of all time. I’ll be getting through games 100 through 91. I honestly don’t remember if Cursed!? is going to make the list or not.

But, I like Cursed!? a lot. When it comes to solo games, I put them into two categories. There are the bigger campaign games or big solo games that I really like. Then there are the small ones, that a fillers, that I enjoy as well. Both of them provide something different.

The bigger games offer, often, a bigger narrative experience. And in that experience you’re going to have a lot of heavy decisions, a lot of story decisions and things like that. But for the smaller games, and I make this comment on the stream, it’s the type that I can take to work.

I’m in a lot of meetings. Often those meetings will finish a little bit early. I won’t have an email to respond to, I won’t have time to start a bigger project, so what do I do in that down time. Sometimes I just browse a bit online but I want to get better about not doing that. So small games like Cursed!? work really well. As you saw, there is little to no room it takes up. So I can play a game, or in this case two, while waiting for a meeting to end.

Upcoming Streams

So, upcoming streams, on Wednesday we are starting the Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition. That is starting at 8 PM Central and I’ll be going through games 100 through 91. Join me then to see what games make the list, there are some new ones on there, I’m pretty sure, so it’ll be interesting to see which ones make the list and which ones adjust where they have been.

And on Monday, I still plan on gaming. And my plan, at 9 PM Central, is to play Trailblazers. However, I will give the caveat that I need to learn the rules. If I get those knocked, that is my plan to play. I’ve heard good things about Trailblazers as a solo game. So join me then to see what game I’ll play.

But the best way, if you want to know when I go live or a new video goes up (it’s basically always live), please consider subscribing. You can do that here. And click that notification bell on the channel and you’ll always know when I go live.

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