Solo Boardgaming
This morning I got randomly pointed at a topic through one of the more important of my countless groupchats that accompany me through my daily life. Yesterday a friend in this group started his own blog and a lot of times in my life I thought about doing the same, but I never really knew where to start. I decided that in the end it's just about starting, so I maybe just take whatever my scatterbrain comes up with and write a little paragraph from time to time and publish it here.
Another friend in the same chat has his first baby being born, which is very exciting for everyone and this made someone else send a meme. He was about to bring stuff for his girlfriend to the hospital, where she was waiting for the little thing to come out at any moment. Some of the things he was about to bring were boardgames, as these two are share this hobby with each other (and sometimes with me). So someone sent this:
[As I am not paying for this platform yet I cannot include pictures in the post, but the meme that got sent was a post of a husband bringing stuff to the hospital to his wife for the birth of his second child. The joke was that all of the stuff he brought were boardgames and nothing else. A lot of them were solo boardgames meant to be played by just one player.]
And this gave me the idea to just write the first of my blog entries about a topic I often think about, because like them I also love boardgaming (and TTRPGs) and it feels like a thing I could spend almost every day with. Unfortunately it is not one of the things that most my friends would do every day - either because their brains do not have it as one of their top priorities or because simply they do not have as much time as I do. This means sometimes it is just hard to find someone to play with and so naturally I tried solo-boardgaming before, but it never really hit me as much as I hoped it would. I think I recently understood why.
The idea of solo boardgaming is a very romantic one for me. I played all types of videogames in my life and it was mostly a great time, but nothing was ever as fun as sitting around a table with friends playing an actual physical game while looking at familiar faces and interact with those other human beings as nature intended: sitting cramped around a table full of thousand boardgame pieces, snacks and drinks (do not put them on the table near my game though, haha) and a bit of dungeon synth in the background to set the mood. So why not do it without any company and spend a cosy night doing exactly that - just with myself?
Spending time alone and doing something just for me is a thing I generally struggle with and I constantly challenge myself do it more (so maybe also a blog can help me with doing just that?). I do enjoy playing videogames alone from time to time, even though I always preferred to play with other people - be it online, together with someone sitting next to me on the couch or with hundreds of others on LAN-Parties when I was a teenager. But when I tried to play a boardgame just by myself, it just did not hook me for very long.
I was actually excited when I bought The 7th Continent - a semi-open world adventure game where you explore a mysterious island and try to solve its mysteries while surviving the endless threats waiting for you under each card. It might actually not be the first time I played a boardgame alone: as a child I spent countless hours testing out my Magic decks against myself, which was maybe even slightly fun, but more so the means to an end. Even back then I did not have friends to play around me all the time I wanted to play. I remember unpacking The 7th Continent with the excitement I always have with a new boardgame - half of the reason why this hobby is so much fun for me is the dopamine I get from researching games online for hours and then after buying one waiting days or weeks for it to arrive, ripping off the plastic and opening the box, before finally seeing all the mysterious content inside made of cardboard, wood and plastic. I had the same excitement this time when I read the rules, assembled the pieces and started to play. To be fair: I was apparently so excited I did not even take the time to prepare a proper environment and just spread the game out on my couch table bending weirdly over it and this probably did not really help with the experience. My back was a mess after a short time, but it was something else that made me not enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
Aside from actually bringing people together physically there is something about boardgames that makes me almost always choose them over videogames. It is something that is in the nature of the design that most of games on a computer or on a console do not have. You could argue that digital multiplayer games also brought me and my friends together (alas not physically), which is of course one of the reasons I spent the most of my childhood and teenage years online clicking digital heads or memorizing buildorders to build my bases faster than my opponents. But what makes this experience different: Aside from social deduction games, most of the videogames I can think of are more one-dimensional on the social level. Almost always the goal is to be faster, more accurate or otherwise more skilled than the people you play against or your virtual enemies - no matter if its people you know well or anonymous faceless players somewhere on the other side of the continent. But rarely do videogames have an element of being cunning, inventive, imaginative or funny in social interactions.
In contrast most boardgames that I love give you the opportunity to consensually behave to your friends like you would not do in real life. Lie, bluff, mislead, steal from or ally with someone, just to stab them in the back a few moments or even hours later. Maybe even more importantly make them laugh, make them think, make them deduct, make them question or make them imagine things. I would not say that digital multiplayer games are generally not able to do that, but there is a reason why online social deduction games like Among Us have been so insanely popular and were also a lot of fun for me personally.
And here is why solo-boardgames are just not working for me: If you strip all the social interactions from a boardgame, what you are left with is basically a singleplayer videogame, where the mechanics are very limited through the very nature of it not being digitally run by a computer. On top of that you are doing all of the annoying upkeep yourself instead of letting the machine do it for you. Of course I do not want to deny anyone the fun of playing these - I see why this can theoretically be entertaining for other people - just not for me. For the same reason I do not play so-called "eurogames" that much, as they mostly feel like a more sophisticated version of solitaire to me. Everyone around the table plays for themselves until you compare who did it the best and declare a winner in the end. I also understand that this exact point - the missing of most of the social interactions baked into the game - is why someone would prefer this experience even. Being put in challenging social situations can of course also be a source of stress that some people may not like. But this is what is at the core of ths issue for me, because I love precisely this challenge. And even more so I like seeing my friends being put under the same stress and take it on creatively, just to then release it in all sort of fun ways.
What recently has come to my attention more and might be something that may work for me - not lastly because I just discovered my love for writing (lets see how long it lasts, haha) - are solo TTRPGs. They seem to be almost like a way of journaling or writing a story through a setting, prompts, rules and dice. I already looked at a few that seem interesting and who knows, maybe I will actually continue this blog and write about my experience with them in the future.
Until then, cheers.
PS.: One of my friends pointed out that I use the "-" wrong and should use an em dash. I never understood what these are for and why it is important to use a stroke that is a few pixel longer - I just know that bullshit LLMs like ChatGPT use it a lot because they copied it from human writers. Let this and other mistakes be the proof that this writing is completely AI free.