I Don't Play Games Solo And I've Stopped Apologizing For It

Solo modes are everywhere now, automas and bot decks and apps that play the other side for you, and I understand why, plenty of nights nobody’s around and you still want to open a box. I own games with genuinely well designed solo variants. I basically never use them, and for years I felt a little embarrassed admitting that, like I was missing out on some obvious convenience everyone else had already figured out.

Here’s what I’ve landed on instead. The whole appeal of this hobby, for me, was never really the puzzle in the box. It’s watching someone else’s face when they realize what you just did to them, or the specific kind of silence that happens at my kitchen table when a plan falls apart in real time and nobody saw it coming, including me. A bot doesn’t wince. A bot doesn’t groan when the dice go against it, doesn’t get quietly competitive halfway through and start actually trying. Playing a game against an automated opponent is playing the mechanics with none of the reason I wanted the mechanics in the first place.

I know the counterargument, that solo play is often objectively the better puzzle, tighter, more consistent, no downtime waiting on another player’s turn. I don’t disagree with any of that on paper. It’s just that I didn’t get into this because I wanted a well tuned puzzle. I got into it because a coworker sat me down and showed me a deckbuilder years ago, and what stuck wasn’t the deckbuilding, it was him, watching my face while I figured it out badly for the first time, needling me about a bad trade I’d made three turns earlier. That’s the whole thing for me. Take the other person out and you’ve kept the cardboard and lost the actual game.

So when I review something and mention the solo mode is fine or skip it entirely, that’s why, not because I think it’s poorly designed, usually it isn’t, but because I genuinely can’t evaluate what I don’t reach for. I’d rather text someone and wait two days for a free evening than crack a box open alone on a Tuesday. Some people find that limiting. It’s just an honest description of what actually gets a game to the table in my house, an empty chair across from me is a dealbreaker, not a workaround.

I’m not telling anyone else to feel the same way about it. Plenty of the best nights other people describe in reviews I read are solo nights, and I believe them. I just know my own answer, and I’ve stopped hedging it into something softer than it is.