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.<p>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” had. After all, games are not fun when someone is cheating.<p>Thankfully, my days of playing board games by myself is long over. However, I still have a tendency to take a long time to calculate my next move since I’m always trying to factor in what everyone else is doing.
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.<p>-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.<p>-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.<p>-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.
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.<p>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.<p>I would appreciate pointers in that direction.<p>As a bonus, if you are interested in abstract board games and eurogames, GIPF project [4] is worth checking out.<p>[1]: <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38371/hipbone-games" rel="nofollow">https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38371/hipbone-games</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691025667/laws-of-the-game" rel="nofollow">https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691025667/la...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://senseis.xmp.net/?TheProtractedGame" rel="nofollow">https://senseis.xmp.net/?TheProtractedGame</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIPF_project" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIPF_project</a>
As well as solo play, I've also started playing more digital versions of board games where an AI opponent is available. Whist not at all social it is a good way to quickly work on your strategy for when you do find a mutually convenient time to play online with friends. Plus most of them work on a decently powered laptop and don't need powerful graphics cards that a lot of other games do.
Works for typical puzzle/optimization Euros, but not for the games my gaming groups have enjoyed most. Anything involving politics, diplomacy, intrigue, back stabbing and the like just don't work solo. Nor do RPGs except for grindy munchkin-fests like CRPGs. IMHO, that human interaction is the reason to play games with other people.
Somebody is <i>really</i> bored.<p>Still, this is a great era for not being bored. There's far more content coming out every day than anyone can consume. That was not the case two decades ago.