I Will Not Play a Game Solo and I've Stopped Apologizing For It

Half the boxes on my shelf have a little solo icon printed on the back next to the player count, and as far as I can tell I have never once used a single one of them, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself after this many years in the hobby.

It’s not that I think solo modes are bad, some of them are apparently genuinely well designed, I’ve read enough to know that Gloomhaven’s automa system and whatever variant Cyclades bolted on later get real praise from people whose opinions I trust. It’s not a snobbery thing either, I’m not sitting here thinking solo players are doing the hobby wrong, that would be a ridiculous thing to believe about a completely legitimate way to spend an evening. I just, personally, cannot make myself sit down and play a game against a deck of cards or a scripted bot when there’s a real person forty feet away in the next room who would probably say yes if I asked.

I’ve turned this over enough to have an actual theory now instead of just a shrug. The parts of a game I actually care about, more than the mechanics, more even than the theme, are the parts that happen around the table and not on it. My wife second-guessing a move out loud before she commits to it. The specific kind of quiet that happens when someone’s deep in a hard decision and you both just sit in it. Getting to watch someone else discover a rule interaction you already knew about and enjoying their reaction more than the interaction itself. None of that exists in a solo game. A solo game against a bot deck is, at best, a genuinely good puzzle, and I like puzzles fine, but it’s not the same category of thing to me as playing with another actual person, and I think I’d been quietly treating them as interchangeable substitutes for years without ever actually checking whether that was true.

There’s a practical side to this too, honestly. I’ve got a built-in opponent most nights of the week, and when she’s not up for it there’s the coworker now, so the actual gap where a solo mode would fill a real need barely exists for me. I don’t know if I’d feel differently about all this if I lived alone. Probably. I think a lot of people’s stated preferences on this stuff are downstream of who happens to be in the house with them more than any real philosophy about games, and I’d rather just admit that about myself than pretend I’ve got some principled stance nobody else has considered.

So the solo modes stay unused, box after box, and I’ve made a kind of peace with owning games I will apparently never experience half the content of. Feels a little wasteful when I put it that way. Doesn’t feel wasteful when I’m actually sitting across the table from her instead.