Every real-ale modern board game wanker had their gateway game that lured them to the expensive world of analogue playtime. Mine was this cartoon-horror adaptation of Star Realms (which itself owes a lot to Dominion, and so on), which I first played on an app struggling through various solo challenges against an AI opponent (win while also collecting the whole Whateley family, or not having any green cards at the end, and so on). This mode sadly turned out to be absent from the strictly multiplayer cardboard version, so as befalls many gateway games, it now sits on the shelf, admired but untouched, as I found other games that were more fun to play against myself or with my child, or just had more expansions I could enjoy collecting.
But in this post-lockdown world, you can look up any game + "solo" and generally find some fiddly rules that someone's knocked together, so I tried some out.
R'lyeh Rising ***
Cthulhu plays any (or all) cards from the trade row based on dice rolls. There are also some instant-doom cards hidden low down in the decks, if you manage to get that far. I played a couple of times and lasted about six rounds. The insurmountable challenge is narratively sound, but playing against myself and actually getting to use some of the cards is more rewarding.
The Dark Lord Rises ****
More interactions with the trade row instead of dice make this feel more like the real game than the last variant, but it has the opposite problem of seeming too easy, unless I just got lucky. I might try it again.
Reskinning Star Realms' tricky Nemesis Beast boss card was so obvious that I didn't think of it, but the resulting imbalance seems to work in the player's favour. I hoarded purple cards and stayed ahead in the tedious tug of sanity until it was over. I don't enjoy the Star Realms bosses much either.
