This is the first of a series of three blog posts by David Digby, about designing board game solo modes. We will release parts 2 and 3 over the next week or so.
Let me be clear, I am not setting myself up to be any sort of expert, but I have been very lucky to work with a number of well established designers and developers and feel like I have my own spin to impart on the topic. To date I have 1 published solo design; Chocolate Factory, 2 signed up solo designs coming to Kickstarter later this year in Scrumpy: Card Cider and Eternal Palace, and 2 fan-made designs on BGG for Concordia and Reavers of Midgard. There’s a few more in the pipeline that I hope you’ll hear about in time. I have also been a playtester and developer on a few other solo designs including for industry leaders David Turczi and Nick Shaw.
Types of solo mode
I break solo modes down into 3 main types. These are not hard lines, more like categories in a Venn diagram with some overlaps between them but hopefully I’ll explain my thinking well enough to tell you why I do this. My types are puzzles, challenges, and opponents. I’ll go into more detail later but here are my definitions:
Puzzle: A solo gameplay experience that has a single solution, you either win or lose.
Challenge: A set of restrictions or a framework that sets a target for the player. These have a sliding scale of success.
Opponents: An artificial opponent that replicates a human player, or an outside force that the player competes against.
You’ll notice I’ve not used common terms like automa or bot or beat your score. Why I have done that should also become clear during these posts.
What sort of solo experience do you want?
This will be one of my opening questions when talking to a designer or publisher about their game. It is also perhaps the most critical, which is why I start here. There are as many answers as there are games but here’s a few paraphrased answers that should make it clear.
“A solo mode where a single player can feel challenged with variable difficulty and replayability. It should also allow the game to be played cooperatively”
“Accurately replicate a two player game, with a smooth, easy to use AI”
“Create an opponent for any player count that can act as a player would, using only the original game components”
“An AI system which can play the game with various strategies”
“An interesting and variable play mode where one player tries to hit certain goals”
“Two artificial forces that replicate the player interaction in a multiplayer game but allow players freedom to play their own game”
Hopefully from those you can see how many options there are. It’s not just a simple matter of building a bot that does exactly what a player does or a beat your score mode. That’s why I steer away from those terms. Really focus on what sort of solo experience you want players to have, it is as important a question for solo as it is for the whole game in general, if not more so as the game is 100% of what the player interacts with. How often has a game been more enjoyable because of the people you played with? Taking that away means you have to work doubly hard to create the right experience.
Next questions
With an experience in mind we need to ask a few more details to be able to write a design brief. I write a brief for everything I work on, and keep going back to it as I work. This brief and the theme of the game should help answer any questions you have and will really shape the design and development process. There are no right or wrong answers and there’s a bit of variance in these but you should get the jist.
- How do players interact within the game?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of a 2 player game?
- Which gameplay elements are essential and which can be removed?
- How do players win or lose or score?
- How important is variable difficulty?
- How long should it last?
- Will any elements of the solo game be used in multiplayer?
- Where should player’s decisions be made?
- What restrictions do we need to put in place?
- Will it be used by players to learn either the rules or strategies of the game?
- What factors may limit components used for solo only?
With all this information in place you should be able to write an accurate design brief. You should also now be able to identify where the solo mode falls within the types we mentioned earlier. Let’s take a look at 2 examples.
Concordia
I love Concordia, it’s an absolute classic, with a superbly smooth gameplay system in the cards. Venus added team play but what was missing was a solo mode. I found one on BGG which was dice based. I am not a fan of completely random dice based solo modes anyway, they have always felt a bit lazy and too random. So I went back to what makes Concordia great, the cards. Surely I could write rules that used the normal cards to form an AI deck? This is an out and out opponent type solo game, your only aim to beat your opponent. The opponent is a replicated player. The design challenge here is building a system that’s easy to use and competitive. As a solo player you don’t want so much admin to do that it feels like you’re playing the game 2-handed. Equally if it’s too simple it will be easy to beat. This balance of ease of use and difficulty is where the art of building an AI comes in and we’ll discuss that later. Lots of testing later, with some help from Dan Regewitz, I’d come up with a set of rules that allowed you to play all versions of the game with one or even 2 AI players.
Chocolate Factory
The main gameplay of Chocolate Factory can be described as multiplayer solitaire. So making a solo mode is going to be easy right? Don’t you just play the game on your own? There are large numbers of solo players who will revolt at the prospect of a beat your score solo mode, and yet there are still lots of them, some of them are very good. For those of you who don’t know the game the points of interaction come from drafting factory tiles and employee cards, and competitive scoring. Matt Dunstan and Brett Gilbert had designed a solo mode that came to me for testing. This involved goals that the solo player had to complete to win the game, a challenge style solo mode. Perfect fit for the game but what I changed was how that was run. What I felt it needed was a sense of an outside force, not an artificial opponent but just something to give it an edge.
We came up with a weekly target and daily demand set up that was designed to put the player in the role of the factory manager who had the owner or sales team telling them what to make in their factory. This creates a puzzle for the player to solve as there is only one right answer, do everything on the cards to win the game, how they go about that is up to them however. By removing some upgrades each round, and the way demands are revealed each day we took a puzzle and made it more into a challenge as the player needed to react and adapt. We combined elements from all 3 of our solo game types to create a quite unique mode that is hopefully enjoyed by a range of solo players.