THREE FAST SOLO GAMES
CAVERNA: CAVE VS CAVE
Caverna in its grown up form is a popular worker placement game, but this slim two player box comes with the right amount of stripped back gameplay for solo fast play. Players spend their turns taking two actions from the main strip (a very skinny, folded board) to excavate their particular cave, before doing a bit of home décor on it. As you build rooms in your cavern you’ll open up new opportunities to activate those rooms, gathering yourself more resources or other bonus outcomes. While it’s not quite Animal Crossing meets Dwarf Fortress, it does have the pleasing effect of variability in the replays. The cave tiles you’re excavating are randomly laid, so you’ll never be quite sure what options you’ll have next turn.
In the solo mode you take actions from the main board, and deal out additional tiles to account for the missing player (who would be contributing these to the general pool as they excavate). Beyond this, adding in the fact that rooms need a certain wall configuration to work (it’s a bit like you’ve knocked through to have an open plan kitchen and then decided to put the wall back) makes for a thinky little spatial puzzle as well. As a beatthe-score solo game it’s one that offers deep variety and a strong Euro theme.
VEILWRAITH
It would be hard not to mention this solo-only masterpiece from Tristan Hall. Given that we’ve mentioned the quality of Hall Or Nothing games for solo adventuring experiencing before, a short version that you can get done in a lunch break is always going to make it onto this list. Veilwraith offers a joined up campaign too while retaining much of the Kilforth vibe in moody black and white. Players juggle their three power slots by activating their action cards, and clearing away the various lingering spirits and collecting the all important keys that will let you progress to the next part of the campaign. It’s a game that is surprisingly rhythmic in its play, and something that’s really interesting in terms of highlighting how much the ‘flow’ or ‘feel’ of a solo experience can make or break a game. Playing feels like carefully, but quickly, balancing all of your threats and risks. The quickest taste of Kilforth you’re going to get.
OH MY GOODS!
To me, this is a bit of a lost gem, and the second of the series that I have mentioned in this column (Expedition to Newdale is the later and larger campaign version of this game, and it’s brilliant).
Here we’re just using a deck of cards to build a tableau of goods-creating industries, with face-down cards representing the good we have produced on top of each location. This is the backwards bit of logic in the game that makes the initial teach difficult, but everything else more rewarding. Once buildings have produced goods of any kind, they can also be activated for their supply chain with the cards from your hand, or those on other buildings – meaning you can take your wheat (worth three gold) and coal (worth one gold) and move them to the bakery, where magically all those cards are now worth four gold.
With the central market of goods being the main input for your engine, there’s a little bit of push your luck, it being revealed in two tranches of card draw – meaning sometimes you’ll gamble on the materials cropping up that you really need in the second draw. As you can see this kind of puzzle naturally lends itself to solo play and the sheer range of different engines you can build and choices you can make. We used the solo rules from this BGG thread below, but there is an official solo expansion. ttgami.ng/omgsolobgg