The most difficult mechanic in any tabletop game is finding people to play it with. The logistical difficulties of organizing a group, the influx of quality indie TTRPGs, and countless other factors have led to something of a renaissance in solo tabletop role-playing games – particularly solo rules for games that would otherwise apply to a full group.
To be clear, the solo tabletop phenomenon is not new. As Polygon's Tom Ana explains, war games began in earnest in the '80s and slowly gained traction over the next few decades until the quarantine period of the ongoing COVID pandemic provided the perfect time for board games and TTRPGs. Standalone TTRPGs like the historical one by Tim Hutchings Millennial vampireShawn Tompkins IronswornChris Bisettes The wretchedAnd Alone under the stars by Takuma Okada laid the foundation for solitary tabletop RPG experiences.
In the five years since 2020, demand has only grown. At PAX Unplugged last month, I heard a repeated refrain: people came looking for solo RPGs. While so many great games have come out in the last few years, tabletop gamers seem to have stuffed their shelves with games that they may never find a group to play. To achieve this, designers have begun to incorporate solo play into their rulesets – either by creating a secondary addition, by setting solo rules as a challenging goal during their crowdfunding campaigns, or by integrating these rules into the base game itself. The three games below represent the range of approaches designers have taken to incorporating solo rules into their games.
Swedish game studio Free League Publishing has created solo rules for its Nordic horror role-playing game Vaesen in 2023. The solo version of the game was written by Per Holmström and includes a step-by-step guide that transfers the base game's given secret to one that you discover over time. With a deck of cards and the random tables from the land register alone Vaesen has players uncover the mystery by rolling dice to determine their discoveries, while using the suit and value of the cards to determine the outcome of their actions.
Based on the classic hook and ring game, HUNTING(s) by Meghan Cross and Dillin Apelyan has two players take on the opposing roles of a hunter and a monster. Players each roll 2d6 and compete to see who can roll a double first to move their token along the board. The winner then draws a card with a corresponding prompt and advances the story in the same tradition as games For the queen. The solo iteration of the game lasts HUNTERThe core experience involves examining monstrosities and pushes the player to move on a scale of acceptance or rejection. A stretch goal for HUNTING(s)As part of the crowdfunding campaign, the solo ruleset was written by Elliot Davis, who wrote his own solo game. Project Eccoas well as solo editions of Soul Muppets Orbital Blues And Paint the town red.
A surreal horror game with a lost gameplay style inspired by Jeff VanderMeers destruction, The Zone From the jump he concentrated fully on the solo game. In a similar way HUNTING(s/ed), This game relies on card-based prompts to guide players through a quarantined zone full of mutations, from which only one of them will make it out alive. For each action, a “Not So Easy” card must be drawn that has a “Yes and” or “No, but” outcome. Billed as a game for 1-6 people (rather than 2-6 people with a game master), the solo rules were always firmly in place The Zone. The solo rules remain largely the same, except that the single player controls multiple characters.
