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The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

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Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#41

Post by galfarragem »

spugody wrote: post #32
galfarragem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also an only child and I'm thankful that I was raised in an area with plenty of kids. I never missed having real siblings. (Future) Parents of this world remember this when choosing a place to live, specially nowadays that only childs are becoming the norm.

Aside from being in that area, did you wish you had a sibling growing up? Selfishly my partner and I want to stick with a single child but for his sake we are thinking of having another.

I never wished I had real siblings, I had 2 "brothers" and an older "sister" living next doors while a kid. Despite my personal anecdata, I would prefer to have more than one child. Being a single child has more negatives than positives. Parents always expect/demand more and can't avoid to treat them as scarce.

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#42

Post by 9214 »

Design of 1-player and 0-player games is a topic that really interests me, but finding any coherent resources on it is a non-trivial task.

Aside from card solitaire reviews, Hesse's "glass-bead games" (aka Hipbone games [1]) and various articles on Game of Life, only [2] with [3] seems close enough to what I have in mind (+ variations on Jung's active imagination with tarot, surrealist games), mainly using board games as a tool for thought and modeling beyond the purview of classical game theory.

I would appreciate pointers in that direction.

As a bonus, if you are interested in abstract board games and eurogames, GIPF project [4] is worth checking out.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38371/hipbone-games

[2]: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691025667/la...

[3]: https://senseis.xmp.net/?TheProtractedGame

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIPF_project

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#43

Post by neuland »

k__ wrote: post #3

Half-OT: Anyone knows good contemporary board/card games for two players? I like deduction games like "Mastermind".

Other people have mentioned a lot of good 2 player games that I like, particularly Dominion, Carcassonne, Hive, and Sagrada. But, I'll add the following recommendations that I haven't seen mentioned:

- Jaipur

- Century: Spice Road

- Race for the Galaxy

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#44

Post by cableshaft »

thex10 wrote: post #20
qaid wrote: post #2

As an only child, I used to spend my summers playing board games by myself. It started with monopoly (which my babysitter introduced me to) and carried over to chess and beyond. For many of the games, I ended up assigning one player to be “me” and different personalities to “the other players,” who each had different styles. I also tried my best to stop “myself” from cheating by forgetting what cards “everyone else”…

Another only child here. Solitaire, a Game Boy, and later Minesweeper, Hearts, and Freecell were some of my single-player entertainment. It never occurred to me to play a board game by myself; major props to your young imagination!

Never occurred to me to play a board game solo as a kid either, and I used to bring my NES controller and a Super Mario Brothers 3 Strategy Guide full of maps to my grandmother's to pretend to play through the game.

But I design board games now, and boy do I ever play my own games against myself now. I'll play up to 4 players solo for playtesting purposes, no problem. So far the only types of games that it's seemed pretty impossible to do this with are social deduction and party games.

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#45

Post by altacc »

oarsinsync wrote: post #40
JackMorgan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but likely the various paid and free DLC for Tabletop Simulator might have such features. Keep in mind as someone who enjoys boardgames TS can be a surprisingly steep learning curve.

> Plus most of them work on a decently powered laptop and don't need powerful graphics cards that a lot of other games do. Tabletop Simulator absolutely kills my 15" 2015 MBP (integrated graphics only). The interface is laggy, and the fans are running at max after about 10 mins of gameplay. Not that it doesn't work when there's no dedicated digital alternative that it exists, but its generally my absolute last choice…

Have you tried Tabletopia? Lacks the AI, so it's for playing against real opponents, but runs in the browser. It's still laggy at times though, it's not quite scaled to cope with the increased numbers staying home.

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#46

Post by cableshaft »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #24
altacc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people simply consuming media for long periods of time is boring and unmotivating. Playing a strategy boardgame is much more interesting and involved.

IDK, there are some really good and compelling single player video games out there nowadays. I'm trying to play half a dozen at the same time lately <_<.

While I agree there's a lot of compelling single player games out there (my PS4 backlog is over 20 games at this point, still slowly working through FF7 Remake), they tend not to really scratch the same itch.

A lot of those games are often very story or action driven, and aren't really about successfully navigating a system of interlocking mechanisms like a lot of board games are. There are exceptions out there (XCOM: Enemy Unknown comes to mind, although that was designed by Ananda Gupta, the same guy who designed one of the best thematic strategy board game ever - Twilight Struggle - and he prototyped XCOM as a board game first), but not many.

Logistics video games also seem to work well, like Factorio or any of the Zachtronics games, about making the most efficient system you can to accomplish a goal.

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#47

Post by navbaker »

I can't recommend Fantasy Flight Games' co-op card offerings enough. They allow 1-4 people to play against an encounter deck that acts as the opposition and generates the story of the quest/encounter.

-Lord of the Rings: They have the rights to the books, not the movies, which allows for a ton of creative writing and characters. Definitely the heaviest and most complex of the three, but allows for the most granularity in deck building. Has an enormous card pool.

-Arkham Horror: VERY story driven, cosmic horror theme that draws heavily from Lovecraft writing, but isn't afraid to blaze its own path. Feels very much like an RPG.

-Marvel Champions: Lighter weight than the other two, but an absolute blast to play. Very pick up and play with minimal story, feels like an action brawler. The newest of the three. Deck building is much less of a chore than with the others. You pick a super hero, they come with fifteen hero-specific cards, then pick an aspect (think color from Magic) and fill out the deck with only cards from that aspect.

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#48

Post by sharksauce »

qaid wrote: post #2

As an only child, I used to spend my summers playing board games by myself. It started with monopoly (which my babysitter introduced me to) and carried over to chess and beyond. For many of the games, I ended up assigning one player to be “me” and different personalities to “the other players,” who each had different styles. I also tried my best to stop “myself” from cheating by forgetting what cards “everyone else”…

I figured a bunch of only children would reply here.

I spent 4-5 years playing Avalon Hill wargames alone (Panzer Blitz, Squad Leader, 1776, etc.), trying to play each side's strategy as accurately as I could. I don't know if it made me a better tactician but it certainly threw open the gates of historical curiosity to the point that 12-year-old me knew more about WWII than my parents.

Re: The utilitarian pleasures of playing board games by yourself

#49

Post by lukifer »

navbaker wrote: post #47

I can't recommend Fantasy Flight Games' co-op card offerings enough. They allow 1-4 people to play against an encounter deck that acts as the opposition and generates the story of the quest/encounter. -Lord of the Rings: They have the rights to the books, not the movies, which allows for a ton of creative writing and characters. Definitely the heaviest and most complex of the three, but allows for the most granularit…

It isn't one-player exactly, but it's easy to jump into from home during quarantine, so quick plug: FFG's tragically deceased LCG Android:Netrunner lives on digitally at http://jinteki.net, and the community is very welcoming to new players. (It's also open-source and quite elegantly engineered using Clojure/ClojureScript.)
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