THE SOLOIST
Quick coffee games, for one
You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to be playing a solo game before me this month. Having heard the phrase ‘first cup of coffee game’ thrown around a couple of times – a phrase that usually means a solo, contemplative game that is quick enough to play while having your first cup of steaming joe – I embarked on an anti-social experiment. I decided to get up a little bit early (around 5:30), and try and play a solo game in under 30 minutes with a cup of coffee each morning. Would this be an eye-opening and wellbeing-improving habit that I stick with? Or an act of vandalization on my productivity and approach to solo gaming? Either way, dear reader, you now know the circumstances that these games were played in.
The very idea of a coffee break game was a bit of a shock to my system, much in the way that people have a board game night every night, if the Board Game Geek forums are to be believed. The question is simply, how can it be done? As a solo player I like to nibble at games, leave them set up overnight and visit them occasionally between the rest of life’s duties. Treating a board game like a quick run of (deadly roguelike platformer) Spelunky didn’t naturally fit into my way of playing games. So how did I adapt?
Initially, pretty badly. My first sessions were interrupted with ‘oh, that needs to go on my to-do list’ thoughts and a general urge to get on with some pressing work. After a few sessions however, it began to feel much more normal. It reminded me of times in the past where I attempted the creative writing exercise of ‘morning pages’ – writing first thing in the morning to get whatever you might think of to write at that slightly odd time – out. It’s said to have psychological benefits, and generally provides a sense of order to your thought patterns for the day. The effect here is pretty similar, I was making time for a game when I wouldn’t normally, and if I committed to that time, I would feel slightly jollier about the world.
Additionally, because the kind of solo games I am often drawn to are longer adventure and exploration style games, finishing a game every time you sit down to play it solo was its own new experience. Add in the idea that end scoring matters, and suddenly I’m playing games much more differently (usually, I’m more of an ‘it’s about the journey, man’ kind of player).
Troyes Dice, maybe my favourite roll and write game, is excellent solo and tracking your previous scores is a way of making it more engaging. The fact that here you’ve got a game with a destructive Survive: Escape from Atlantis! elements (occasionally the game will smash a column of your score sheet, if not protected) means the themes of getting your points to safety becomes the theme of the game remains unchanged from multiplayer.
The Uwe Rosenberg designed Caverna: Cave vs Cave offers a similar treat, and with a variable set up making for a sense of discovering the challenge every time you play. For a very fast experience of this kind, speedruns of Escape The Dark Castle has something of the same exploration about it – flipping narrative cards as you attempt, once again, to escape. This is especially good if you’ve not played it to death with your usual groups already and would really like to stitch together a new story for yourself in record time. It also has the benefit of an extremely fast set-up, a feature of all games that fit into this category – although all mentioned here are outshone by Oh My Goods! for its pure depth of gameplay in a single stack of cards that needs little more than a couple removing to get you started and a quick shuffle to get going.
As to the question of whether I’m going to continue the early morning games practice, the answer is… no. But the idea of a very quick game, where getting everything set up and fully complete within 30 minutes is now an option open to me. It might be more of a sneaking a quick game in on a Sunday evening thing however.