THE BEST BADDIES

We explore the world of solo gaming one move at a time This month: cardboard antagonists

Solitaire games come with a few quirks that you have to get over when you start out. It’s a little bit like the first time you really play a roleplaying game and have to get to grips with the idea that you can try to do pretty much anything. For solo games the first of these is the sense that you’re going to be playing against yourself. You might imagine that you’re going to be sitting at one side of the table pondering a move, and then running around to the other side – possibly disguised with a hat, fake moustache and a lisp – to play the other side’s turn. And if this is how you imagine solo play, then it’s going to seem a bit silly. After all, isn’t it always going to fall apart when one side of the table ‘throws’ the game?

Yes, of course it will. Which is why solo games use a series of clever bad guys to bounce of against. These can come in two main flavours 1) the evil antagonist, or 2) the cardboard player. Before we get into each of these there’s a few things we like to see when it comes to playing ‘against’ a cardboard AI or automa. These can be summarised as – ‘don’t make me be your banker,’ ‘don’t make me choose for you,’ and ‘don’t go easy on me’. This is all to say that we don’t want to be doing housekeeping for the AI, have any actual choices that we could fudge in our favour, and

we want the experience to be a real challenge. With that, let’s meet our opponents.

THE EVIL ANTAGONIST

The evil antagonist is best explained as a too-powerful cheat. They might take turns like another player would, but their moves are extremely powerful and possibly damaging to you. It’s a bit like a ‘take that’ mechanic, but self-inflicted. In these cases there’s usually some basic instructions that come from flipping a card in a deck, and then there will be an effect inflicted on the player. In the excellent Villagers the solo mode comes with The Countess, who will do things like steal workers away from you.

The Evil Antagonist is designed to be fairly close to a solo experience of a cooperative game. They’re a force of nature within the game world that’s going to give you a kicking each turn, unless you stay on top of their plans.

AI’s like this also tend to include a kind of ‘turn’ in the game. Scythe, a mix between the two kind of opponent we face in solo play has a point in the game where the automa deck is flipped the other way around, and players now face the harder, red, end of the game. This is what helps propel the drama of the game, the fact that you’re facing a tougher fight later on – when you’d also be facing more established opponents when playing with ‘flesh AIs’ – keeps the challenge fresh.

THE CARDBOARD PLAYER

The cardboard player on the other hand doesn’t really mean you any ill will. They’re just trying to enjoy the game as much as a deck of cards can. They will however, get in the way, and act as a more advanced version of the traditional ‘high score’ mode that many solo games employ as their default success or failure.

A great example of this is the solo mode included in the excellent Lost Ruins of Arnak (reviewed page 64). Here there is a deck of token-cards which are shuffled and then played on a turn until the rules force the cardboard player to pass. The cards instruct you to do things like take the furthest available dig site location offering a certain type of resource, placing their meeple and potentially blocking you, or to take an artefact from the market. Here there’s simply a player who is always going to go first on a turn, and often get in your way.

If the fun of solo gaming in a Eurogame is to have a puzzle presented in front of you repeatedly to pick at, then this is like a new puzzle every turn. The difficulty in this mode of cardboard enemy usually comes in the form of picking a tougher deck to play against. In Lost Ruins of Arnak, that’s simply picking more of the red (and therefore harder) cards to mix into that enemy action deck.