There’s a particular tone people get when they find out I’ll set up a board game by myself on a Sunday afternoon, nobody else in the apartment, no plan to teach anyone, just me and a solo mode or a two-handed setup, and the tone is somewhere between confusion and mild pity, as if a board game only counts as a real experience when there are other bodies at the table to validate it.
I get where the assumption comes from. Most of these games are explicitly built around social friction, negotiation, reading someone’s face across the table, the specific kind of joy that only exists between people, and a lot of the marketing leans hard into that framing, so it’s not unreasonable to assume the solo version is a consolation prize for when you can’t get a group together. But I actually seek it out deliberately, not as a fallback, and I think the reasons are worth saying out loud instead of quietly defending myself every time someone raises an eyebrow.
The honest first reason is pace. Playing alone means I set the rhythm entirely, I can pause mid-turn to actually think through a decision tree without feeling the social pressure of four other people waiting on me, which is a real pressure, even among patient friends, even when nobody says anything about it out loud. Some of the most satisfying tactical puzzles I’ve worked through in a game happened solo, precisely because I had the room to sit with a hard decision for five full minutes instead of the usual thirty seconds you get when there’s a table full of people politely not saying anything while you think.
The second reason is less flattering and more true: some games are genuinely better solo, not as a compromise, but as the actual best way to experience them. A tight, puzzle-forward automa system built specifically for one player can be more elegant and more focused than the same game wrestled into an uneven four-person session where someone’s clearly checked out and someone else is running the table. I’d rather have a great solo session than a mediocre group one, and I think a lot of people who dismiss solo play have simply never had a really well-designed automa opponent to compare it against.
None of this means I don’t love game night with a full table, obviously, most of what I write about here comes out of exactly that, and there’s a texture to a good group session that nothing solo can replicate, the specific joke someone makes, the groan when a plan falls apart in front of witnesses. But I’d like the assumption to stop being that solo play is the sad backup option for people who couldn’t get a group together, because for me, plenty of the time, it’s the actual first choice, made on purpose, by someone who genuinely likes the quiet of it.