Against Solo Mode as a Solution

The hobby talks about solo modes like they’re a workaround, a patch applied to a game that was really designed for a table of people, so that the unlucky or the friendless can still get something out of the box. I understand why that framing exists. I just don’t think it’s true, and I’m maybe the one person qualified to say so with a straight face, since I spend most of five months a year with nobody else to play against.

Here’s the part that surprised me the first season I really paid attention to it: solo mode isn’t a consolation prize for missing other people. It’s a genuinely different activity that happens to use the same box. A bot deck or an automated opponent doesn’t bluff, doesn’t get tired, doesn’t misplay out of boredom or overconfidence, doesn’t want to win badly enough to talk trash about it after. What it does instead is force you to be honest about your own decisions in a way another person, sitting across from you, doesn’t always let you be, because with a person there’s a social layer on top of the game, reading their face, managing the relationship, being a good sport, and that layer is worth having but it’s also cover. Alone with a bot deck there’s no cover. You either played the turn well or you didn’t, and there’s no point trying to place blame when there’s no one to place it on, no one to be gracious to for the win either.

I said as much in the review I wrote of Arcs, which as it happens has no solo mode at all, so up here it only exists as a two player game against whoever’s willing to make the four mile hike, which is almost nobody. That absence is what got me thinking about this properly. A game with no solo option isn’t more serious or more real than one that has one, it’s just a game that requires a specific resource I usually don’t have access to, the same way a fourteen foot cabin doesn’t have room for a pool table regardless of how good pool tables are.

The contrarian part of my take, if it counts as contrarian, is that I don’t think solo play is the lesser experience people in the hobby default to assuming it is. It’s a different relationship with the same rule set, closer to reading than to conversation, and reading isn’t a lesser version of talking to somebody just because it’s quieter. Some games are genuinely worse alone, the ones that live entirely on the social layer, bluffing and negotiation, those don’t survive the translation and I’m not pretending otherwise. But plenty of games get better alone, sharper, because you can’t hide behind the table talk anymore.

None of this is me arguing I don’t need other people. I do, obviously, badly, in ways the job makes very concrete every October when I come down off the mountain and have to relearn how to have an actual conversation that isn’t ninety seconds of weather numbers. But needing people and needing them specifically to sit across a game board from you are two different needs, and the hobby conflates them more than it should. Five months a year, mostly alone, has taught me the difference the hard way, which is probably the only way anybody actually learns it.