Marvel Champions

This is probably my favorite solo game right now, and it’s fun because you can customize it for the person you are getting it for. Marvel Champions is a Living Card game put out by Fantasy Flight Games, where you take on the roll of a hero (or you can play up to 4), and you face off against a villain, their henchmen and their schemes. You have two sides you can play as a superhero, you are either in your alter ego side, T’Challa, Tony Stark, Peter Parker, etc., or you are in your hero side, Black Panther, Iron Man, Spider-Man, etc. When you are in the alter ego side the villain only schemes and won’t fight you, when you are in your hero side, they’ll scheme slower, and fight you. It’s a balancing act changing between the sides of a hero. What works well in this game, is that it’s a living card game, that means that Fantasy Flight is supporting it by putting out new heroes, villains, and scenarios for it. So if someone is a huge Black Widow fan, you can grab the base game and the Black Widow expansion pack and customize for them. And there are a ton of different character options. Great for a superhero fan if you life, but also just a really good game.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

So, I’m going with another living card game here. If you try and get someone everything for these, it’ll get extremely expensive, but Arkham Horror: The Card Game, is a great solo game, and worth talking about. In this game you are taking an investigator through a series of story where the choices you make can and will make a difference. If you kill a monster, save a person, find out all the cultists, that’ll adjust your scenario, story, and rewards going forward. This game is a really nice puzzle of a game where you are trying to find clues, pass tests, and fight monsters, using cards that are either equipment or abilities, or spending them for resources to make it more likely you’ll pass a test or so that you can buy one of the cards. It’s a really interesting game system that allows itself to tell so many stories in so many different ways in something that is just a card game. Very smartly made and really enjoyable. This is for someone who loves to try and optimize and solve a mystery/challenge the best that they can.

Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

While the other two have been good gamery games, Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger, is basically just a choose your own adventure book, with some cards and some challenges. This one has a ton of nostalgia to it as you play through what is a completely insane story seeing how well you can do, trying not to die, and reading great story. And by great story, I mean that it’s very crazy story but that it’s a lot of fun. It’s written in a very light way and really interesting and enjoyable. This one works well solo because you can kind of just flip through the cards, make decisions quickly, roll dice when needed for the challenges, and continue. None of the decisions you make seem like they have a massive difference in how the game will go, they mainly will get you stuck in areas or having to deal challenges which you’ll probably eventually defeat. This one is good light fun for a solo gamer who is just looking to have a good time.

First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet

For your sci-fi solo gamer out there, there is First Martians. In some ways this is almost Martian, the book and movie, the board game. You are on Mars, setting up the first colony there, and things are going to be breaking down. You need to think about food, oxygen levels, you might be out exploring the surface, building things to improve your base. This is a pretty challenging game with a not that well written rule book. Fortunately you can learn to play by watching it on the Watch It Played YouTube channel, Rodney Smith does a great job there. First Martians also gives you a number of ways to play. You can pick one off missions focused on different things, such as exploring Mars, building and adding on to the station, or just trying to make a broken station survive. But then there are also campaigns where you play through a few games in a row. Overall this game, while it has it’s flaws, is so much fun to play and offers quick experiences and longer campaigns depending on what you want.

Aeon’s End Legacy

So I mentioned campaign games above, and I think it’s fitting to wrap up this list with a game that has a campaign to it. There are a lot that I could have picked, Mage Knight, Deep Madness, Folklore the Affliction, Sword and Sorcery, Reich Busters, and a whole lot more, but I’m picking Aeon’s End Legacy because I like deck building games, and I think that the game play offered in Aeon’s End is really interesting and easy to solo. By that I mean that in lot of these games you can’t just play them true solo, even something like Gloomhaven you have to control two characters, so you’re doing more “house keeping” and keeping track of leveling up multiple characters. Aeon’s End Legacy isn’t true solo, you do have to control at least two characters, but the game play is much simpler. You don’t need to think about 10 different stats, what weapon or dice to use or roll. Instead, you are just playing your hand of cards when the turn comes up. I’m a big fan of Aeon’s End: War Eternal, so Aeon’s End Legacy is one that I have on my shelf that I need to play, but that I’ve heard great things about and that I can recommend knowing the system well.

Now, there are obviously a lot of other games I could mention, Mansions of Madness, which I’ve talked about before, really most cooperative games can be played solo. I’m even playing through, or will be soon, Pandemic Legacy Season 2 solo. So even games that aren’t truly solo, as long as there isn’t hidden information, can be played solo, but I think that hopefully these are some good options. I basically went with cooperative games, but there are solo variants for things like Alien Artifacts and Scythe out there as well, they just need a bit more house keeping in what is done.

What solo game would recommend for a solo gamer? Or if you are one, what would you want to get?

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• These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
• If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
• If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
• There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them

90. Small World Underground

Now, I like Small World of all varieties so the other might be higher on the list, but Small World Underground does a lot of fun things. Mainly, I like that it adds in some new combinations and it adds in landmarks or buildings that if you control the area, you get a certain added power. It encourages even more fighting but also keeps it from picking on a player. If you aren’t familiar with Small World, it’s a nice introductory style area control game, I like to call it Risk but fun, it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, you have fun and goofy combinations and you still get all of that in this version as well, it just adds in a little bit more, which is a lot of fun.

Last Year: 65

89. Scattergories

First party game on the list, and as a spoiler, there aren’t a ton of party games. But this one is a classic party game that I think works well still. What I like is that with the randomness of picking different lists and rolling to see what letter you get, and just playing with a different group, you can really see a wide variety of answers. I also like this one because it’s extremely easy to play on Zoom or over video chat. You just need one person with the game and everyone else with paper and pencil. You just show off the list and the letter each time and let people work off of that, it makes it a lot of fun and works extremely smoothly.

Last Year: 69

88. The Hobbit

This game is a pretty simple game, but one that I think is pretty fun, what I like about it is that it’s a semi-cooperative game and I think one that works. You are trying to collect the most gems possible, all while getting to the end before Smaug comes out of the Lonely Mountain and makes it to Lake Town, but the member of the party who has the most gems and money is the winner of the game. So you’re leveling up and then facing off against challenges, but if everyone can’t handle the challenges, that means that Smaug is going to advance and you don’t want that happening. So it’s trying to help people level up their skills enough, but also making sure that you’re in position to get the most and the best gems. I think the combination works and the game plays pretty fast for looking like it has a pretty big board.

Last Year: Not Ranked

87. First Martians: Adventures on the Red Plant

Some games are extremely challenging and have a lot of moving parts, this is one of those games, in fact it can feel like there is more going on with upkeep throughout the game than playing the game, for some people, but I like it, not the upkeep, but the game in general, as it’s my number 87. In this game you can play through a series of tied together campaign story as you try and survive in a habitation station on Mars, which The Martian, or you can play one off scenarios that are focused on different things, getting the habitation station up and running or you can go out and explore the planet. The variety of the game works nicely and it feels like there is always more to do than you can. reasonably get done. It’s a good challenging game that might not be for everyone, but is a lot of fun.

Last Year: 72

86. Quoridor

So just higher than a big heavy game, we have a small little abstract game. This one is a lot of fun because of how simple it is. You want to get to the opposite side of the board. To do that, you move your pawn one space in any direction on your turn, or you place a wall that creates a blocker for your opponent. And that’s the game, but there’s more to the game than that, as you try and set-up traps and let the other person get close and then make them back track a long ways, it’s a very interesting game and one that plays quite quickly. I think it works good at two, but I like it at four because there’s a bit more randomness to the game as you have to plan and keep track of more, but there’s also more teamwork that needs to happen as you need to work to stop people at times.

Last Year: 73

85. Root

Now we’re back into bigger games with Root, an asymmetrical war game, basically, with different factions of woodland creatures vying to complete their goals in order to win the game. I like how the different factions play, the cats are all about building up and out, the woodland creatures need to take over areas and don’t start really with a board presence, the birds follow a very specific pecking order (all puns intended) of actions that build up over time. And the Vagabond just builds up their own things and can ally with people or become enemies of them. The game has an extremely long teach as you need to explain how each faction works, and that’s definitely a negative for it, but the actual actions and how to play each faction is pretty straight forward. It’s a big game but one that’s very cute on the table and doesn’t bog itself down when it comes to game play, which is a lot of fun.

Last Year: 70

84. Age of War

Age of War is a small little dice game where you are trying to get the correct combinations on your dice in order to get control of castles, creating sets of them, and scoring points. It’s basically a luck based dice rolling game, but there’s something about it that just works for me. First, the game doesn’t generally take too long. If everyone is unlucky, getting the last castle could take a bit, but I haven’t really seen that happen and turns are very fast. What I like about this as compared to just a random die rolling game like a Farkle or something along those lines is that when you get a castle, it isn’t yours, it could be stolen from you, but it’ll cost just a bit more in terms of dice that you need than it did to take it from the middle. But if you get a full set of the yellow, or grey, or whatever color castles, they flip over and give you a few more points and are locked in for you and can’t be stolen. So if you see someone getting close to a set, it could be worth it to steal from them. That just gives the game a little bit more strategy which is a lot of fun.

Last Year: Not Ranks

83. Star Wars: Imperial Assault

If you want to play a Star Wars dungeon crawl, this is the game. You play through as heroes adjacent to the main story of the original movies, at least out of the core box, as you can be a Jedi in training, a wookie, or one of several other characters and you face off against the Empire. This game can be played with someone running the Empire side or, which I’ve done, there is an app that works well with a good tutorial that walks you through everything so you can play solo. I like that flexibility for the game play, and I like that it feels like Star Wars without it being so closely tied to the main characters or feel like you’re changing the movies, but it still gives you an engaging story. Overall, this is one that I want to play more of.

Last Year: 30

82. Ticket to Ride

Dropping down a bit this year, I still like Ticket to Ride a lot, it is just a bit lower on the gateway game list. This is one of my preferred gateway games, though, and it gives a lot of options for play. I think that it works well for introducing people and while there is some to keep track of in the game as you are planning and building your routes, what you are doing on a given turn is extremely simple and that makes it very accessible. In terms of truly simple gateway games, this one takes the crown for me as the best of them that people have heard of and I can pull out with basically any group. It’s hard to say more about this one, most people know it, and it’s a fun time. Plus there are lots of different maps if you get board with the base game.

Last Year: 38

81. The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth

So, this one is higher than Star Wars: Imperial Assault, but it feels a bit like a sequel to it or one that is built upon it, and it has smoother game play, but it does one thing I don’t love. Just to quickly talk about it, you can play major characters from Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically, in my opinion, I wish they had gone with the archetypes like Imperial Assault did. That said, I like the game play, I like the card play and the deck construction and upgrading it gets that feels like it’s borrowed from Arkham Horror LCG, I think that the combat works well, and overall, it’s just a fun time. The story is cool, and while I haven’t beat it yet, I need to go back and start again and enjoy. I also like that there is part of the game that is on a bigger exploration map and you get to explore new areas, find clues, and things like that as well as fighting, but then there are tactical battles as well in between the explorations. The game feels like there is a ton it can do, so I want to play more. And it has an app that works very nicely.

Last Year: 94

As always, what is your favorite out of this group? I have quite a variety, we have some big games, some small games, party games, and gateway games. So possibly, a little bit of something for everyone.

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