Solitaire games come with a few quirks that you have to get over when you start out. It’s a little bit like the first time you really play a roleplaying game and have to get to grips with the idea that you can try to do pretty much anything. For solo games the first of these is the sense that you’re going to be playing against yourself. You might imagine that you’re going to be sitting at one side of the table pondering a move, and then running around to the other side – possibly disguised with a hat, fake moustache and a lisp – to play the other side’s turn. And if this is how you imagine solo play, then it’s going to seem a bit silly. After all, isn’t it always going to fall apart when one side of the table ‘throws’ the game?
THREE GAMES WITH GREAT CARDBOARD BADDIES
Yes, of course it will. Which is why solo games use a series of clever bad guys to bounce of against. These can come in two main flavours 1) the evil antagonist, or 2) the cardboard player. Before we get into each of these there’s a few things we like to see when it comes to playing ‘against’ a cardboard AI or automa. These can be summarised as – ‘don’t make me be your banker,’ ‘don’t make me choose for you,’ and ‘don’t go easy on me’. This is all to say that we don’t want to be doing housekeeping for the AI, have any actual choices that we could fudge in our favour, and we want the experience to be a real challenge. With that, let’s meet our opponents.