The Case Against Playing Games Alone

I own a handful of games with genuinely well-designed solo modes, the kind where the automated opponent isn’t just a slow lookup table pretending to make decisions, and I want to be fair to them before I say the thing I’m about to say: they’re often good. Some of them are better puzzles alone than they are with people. I still barely play them that way.

Part of it’s practical, obviously, four people means four different reactions to the same unexpected card flip, and that’s a kind of entertainment a bot opponent structurally cannot produce no matter how well it’s coded. But I don’t think that’s actually the core of it for me, because I could say the same thing about a well-written book, and I don’t need other people in the room to enjoy a book.

The thing a game night gives me that I’ve never found a substitute for is watching someone else’s face while they realize they’ve walked into a mistake three turns before I did. That’s it, that’s the whole thing, and it sounds small written out like that but it isn’t. Priya has a very specific look, eyebrows first, when she catches an error in her own plan, and I genuinely look forward to seeing it happen, in a way that has nothing to do with winning or losing.

I think this is part of why I’ve been hard on games in reviews here for the multiplayer-solitaire problem, where everyone’s technically at the same table but nobody’s actually interacting with anyone else’s plan. It’s not that those games are badly designed, some of them are excellent puzzles, it’s that they’re solving a problem I don’t have. I don’t need the game to give me a reason to sit near people, I already have the people, Tuesday nights are already spoken for. What I need the game to do is make those specific people’s decisions visible and consequential to mine, so the room does something a solo session structurally can’t.

Marcus disagrees with me on this, or at least plays devil’s advocate about it, points out that plenty of people don’t have a standing Tuesday group and a solo mode is the only version of a given game they’ll ever actually get to experience, and he’s right, that’s a real use case I’m not accounting for from my specific lucky position of having six years of the same four or five people showing up most weeks.

So I’ll keep buying the occasional solo-mode game, and I’ll keep mostly not playing it that way. Not a principled stand, just an honest accounting of what I actually reach for on a Tuesday.