solo board games!?

I incorporated a one player game into "Sunda to Sahul", but like most single player games it really is, at heart, a puzzle. In this case I justify calling it a game by the fact that you can score the result and try to improve upon your score. Because the result is always different, it is not like solving a logic puzzle or a word puzzle or a jigsaw (even though it looks like a jigsaw). It has a quite high replayability quotient. For people who enjoy puzzles this can be almost as much fun as a multiplayer game (minus the social aspect). One big advantage is you can take as long as you like on a move and you can take your moves back if you wish!

Seems to me that following the "model" of video games

I dunno about solo board games. I suppose solo card games work fairly well though. Usually when I really want to play a board game and I

I've tried a few solo board games and they do occasionally work. I haven't tried to design one yet, but I share Mario's frustration with getting a gaming jones on with nobody to play against. Here are some of my faves:

Ambush!
This game is a lot of fun, especially for a WWII buff. It is a tactical wargame in which you run a squad of American soldiers through different missions on different hex map boards. Each mission is run by a series of paragraphs for events that are looked up on a chart, sort of a wargaming equivelant of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. You can keep any surviving soldiers from mission to mission and they can gain experience as they progress. It is a LOT of counters, as expected from a SPI/Victory Games game.

Last Frontier: the Vesuvius Incident
I had this for the longest time before playing it. It's a solo microgame in which you run a unit of space marines out to rescue crew members on board a space ship that has been overrun by aliens. The game plays out like a good horror movie and the randomness of the events sometimes interact in odd but amusing ways. For example, part of my squad were escorting a crew member and went into the sick bay. There was an alien inside, so they retreated back to the corridor. I drew some encounter chits and found another crew member and another alien. I determined their locations and the crew member was a few spaces away and the alien was RIGHT ON TOP OF HIM. The crewman was turned to goo right away. This terrified the crew member we were escorting and she fled. My heavy weapons marine stepped up to the plate to fire his big plasma gun for the first time. Well, it jammed at that exact moment. The only other marine I had in the area was a hacker with a damaged space suit. All this made for a very tense situation that I wasn't sure I would survive. It was a string of bad luck, but it was so entertaining that I was having a blast!

Now, I must mention that a friend of mine was one of the designers on Last Frontier. However, it truly was a fun game and I recommend it. The rules take some playing with to get your head wrapped around them, but it plays very well and pretty fast once you get it down.