Once again, I am titling a post “Table for One”

In the past, I have written about my foray into solo gaming a handful of years ago. Long story short is that, during the pandemic, I dived pretty deep into the hobby, and my wife and I played a LOT of games during those early days of quarantine. At the time, we just had one kid, my daughter, Averi, and she was pretty well confined to a highchair or a play-yard. As Averi grew into a toddler, it became harder and harder for Rachel and me to sit down and play a game during normal waking hours (I am a bit of a night owl; Rachel is not). So, one night, not quite ready to go to bed yet, I got out my copy of Viticulture Essential Edition, which I noticed said it played 1-6 players, and I decided to give that solo mode a whirl.

From there on, I just about would not buy a game if it did not have a solo mode. The solitaire capabilities of many games gave me access to games that I probably never would have gotten access to otherwise. For instance, I have never played Spirit Island or Marvel Champions: The Card Game any other way than multi-handed solo, and there are plenty of other games where the majority of my plays have been solo plays. I love it, and I love that there is a growing trend to include solo modes in games.

Now, I do have one big caveat to all of this:

Not all games need solo modes. There are several games that I have played solo that I bounced off so hard that I never got around to trying it multiplayer. Also, not all solo modes are created equal.

Still, as a solo game enthusiast myself, I always want to take every possible step to making our games solo-friendly. For Galactic Cruise, we spent a lot of time creating the solo opponent, Rachel (named after my wife!), an adversary that we feel really simulates the feel of another player—down to the fact that she sometimes just has really bad luck (or really good luck), alongside scalable difficulty levels.

In Galactic Cruise, Rachel places her workers and takes her actions based on a Number System devised by T.K. King.

As we near the developmental finish line for Excursions, I have started some solo development in earnest. I always have solo modes in the back of my mind throughout the entire development process, but I've learned from my time developing the Galactic Cruise solo mode that there's only so much solo design one can do while multiplayer development is still underway (after all, there's no need to decide how a solo opponent will build their deck if we are going to scrap deck-building after two more playtests...). While there is still a lot of ground to cover, I think the development is coming along very nicely.

Not final art. I repeat: Not final art! These cards are subject to change and are, in fact, just pieces of printer paper backed up by Magic cards.

What we have here is a very simple go-through-the-deck system, where the human player will take an action, then reveal the next card of the deck and see what the opponent will do, which will either refer to a specific action or to one of the bonus multipliers on the space station. During setup, you stack the deck (think Pandemic, etc.) with 3 "Claim Company Goal and reveal the next card" cards. When the opponent claims their 3rd company goal, that will trigger the end of the game as though they had gained 50 VP. (If you're familiar with how Excursions operates, that might have made sense to you. If you aren't: well, we'd love to have you check it out here on BGG, or join our dedicated Facebook group!) 

I would love to say that this simple, elegant way to run a solo mode was my first attempt—but that would be a big, fat lie. No, no, no. Instead, there was originally a convoluted system that replicated two other opponents, both of which moved a single VP marker using...umm...some weird math. You see, each card in their deck had a number on it, and they would score the higher of the two numbers. Or the difference between them. Or the sum of them. Or the lowest one doubled..?

Yeah, it was a mess.

Thank the Lord, though, that I have Dennis Northcott as a business partner and friend, and he said, "Why don't you just play through a deck, and when the deck runs out, that's it?"

(A recurring theme, I'm sure you'll see, is that, while I do the majority of the work of actually developing the solo modes, the "key" to unlocking how it will actually work is almost always due to T.K. or Dennis and their fantastic ideas.)

We are very excited to reveal more and more about the solo mode for Excursions as we lead up to our Kickstarter this fall!