Is there a market for Solo Board games?

Ambush!

Which essentially was a computer game in a book. I really want to play it.

I occationally play a game solo, usually Scrabble for a high score. I suppose you could do the same with Carc.

It would be fun to play a solo version of Descent, or the like. I'm not sure there is a huge market for this. When I think about most gaming groups, usually 1 in 5 is the guy who loves games and buys them and teaches all the rules. I think that a subsection of those guys are your solo players :)

Take a look at Fantasy Flight, they have produced Arkham Horror and Runebound recently, both brilliant solo games.

I think the market is there, it just requires the 'clever competitor' to be built into the game through smart design and clever mechanics.

C

Wow, it's like you know me.

That is the very wall that I have bashed my head against a billion times when trying to design a solo game. How to make it a game and not a puzzle. This usually leads to a lot of philosophy on what a game actually is, and how to distinguish a game from an activity, etc, but that's a matter for another thread.

Another obstacle I have trouble getting past when conceptualizing solo games is that I simply don't trust the player not to cheat. I know that when I played Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, I had six fingers and a thumb jammed into various spots of the book as placeholders, just in case that damned Gnome zapped me to death for picking the wrong combination of gems. (bonus points... guess the book!)

Recently I spotted a stack of FF books at a yard sale and picked them up, ran through them for real, rolling dice for my stats and fighting the combats honestly, and everything. I never made it halfway through any book, so I guess I was doing alright as a kid by cheating... at least by cheating I ended up getting the whole experience of the storyline. Another note of my recent adventures is that when I died, I was simply not interested in starting the book over again. At all.

So solo games are difficult to invest with any sense of replayability, difficult to force the player to stick to the rules (while in 2+ games, the other players are there as watchdogs), and difficult to generate a system that generates a sense of real opposition to the player without straying into puzzle territory.

Is there a market for them? A small one, I think, but yes. The same nerds that I epitomized in grade school still exist, still need something to read on the school bus or at recess while the other kids are playing tag and throwing clumps of dirt at each other. Granted, those nerds have a LOT more video-games than I did, and those video-games are getting more and more portable all the time, but the basic quiet adventure experience, and the reading, the literary submersion alone into an alternate world that usually accompanies solo games should still hold value for the type of player that is interested in those things.

A well-written storyline with a well-developed system that compliments a well-designed game world wolud hopefully be able to create its own market.

~Josh