1 Survives
2020 / Card game / 2-4 players
****
This one-deck slasher movie was a bit of a dodgy purchase with a young child in the house, but there are places to hide it, and it was at an irresistible price – maybe some of the best value entertainment I've ever bought. Best played with the full cast of six, whether that's with friends or directing them all solo (don't get too attached). It's just a shame I couldn't play this with my Edinburgh ghost gang around 2008, it was made for them.
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.
2008 / Card/board game / 3-6 players
****
It would've been simpler to start out with this basic game rather than coming to it after the spin-off and a semi-custom job, but I couldn't resist a second-hand set for the price. The scoring tokens are a bit fiddly, but more cards are always welcome, and there's all those bunnies.
This is still our favourite family game when both parents are around. When it's just dad and daughter, we switch to Muse, unless she's on a Monopoly kick.
2023 / Adventure gamebook / 1 player
**
The belated sequel to at least one of the endings of the surprisingly dark classic. We persevered, despite characters trying to persuade us to pack it in and go and play something else at various points. It's not difficult to work out where you are along the branching map on the back cover, but I let the six year old enjoy the often doomed journey.
2011 / Board game / 2-4 players
****
Swapped into Ticket to Ride's place just in time to be a more appealing "family" Christmas game (i.e. for Daddy), this comical panda/horticulture simulator looks quite delightful, but a cute theme and miniatures only hold the six year old's interest for a few rounds at present. I hope we'll have some good memories growing up with it anyway – especially once the expansion babies come along.
2020 / Stacking game / 2-6 players
***
I don't think we've had a stacking game since Bugs Building, but constructing this 8-bit/Minecraft fire to plan with tweezers (sometimes forced to use our less dominant hand) is considerably fiddlier.
A fun time filler, though even the low end of the suggested playing time seems optimistic.
2018 / Card game / 2-4 players
*
The daughter loves a bit of Uno, so seeing that there was a sequel for about dos pounds was a no-brainer birthday present. In that I didn't think to check out reviews like I normally do until I'd already bought it and learned how terrible it supposedly was. So it skipped her birthday to avoid disappointment and ended up being more safely cushioned in a Christmas budget games bundle with other tat.
We've played it uno times. Stripped of all the cards that make Uno fun (replaced with maths!!!), we had to play a few rounds of Uno afterwards to get rid of the taste. She won't let us get rid of it though.
***
A selection of choose-your-own-adventure stories enhanced with bits and bobs was an appealing idea, but in practice it feels more like overcomplication, and the tasks are very repetitive, so we might sell this on before bothering with them all. It's at least a step up from Usborne Puzzle Adventures.
2018 / Card game mini expansion / 2-12 players
**
A few extra options at an acceptable discount that made them just about worth getting. Mixed in from the start, we wouldn't know if we had one, but they're getting their use. They should have included more in the first place, but they're easy enough to make up and there's still plenty of space in the box if we want to add our own.
2017 / Card game / 2-12 players
****
Essentially Dixit or Stella for teams, though its cooperative two-player variant was more appealing for our needs. It doesn't spark imagination quite so much, but its restrictive instructions still encourage the six year old to think outside the box – like giving me the three-letter clue "agn" that baffled me until I finally realised it was an abbreviated "dragon." Nice one!
Already having surplus Dixit cards, this was easy to DIY at first by writing down the Inspiration cards and rolling dice to choose, but then we upgraded to the proper game at Christmas, whose purpose-built cards proved a greater challenge.
2013 / Card game / 2-5 players
****
Similar set collecting to Sea Salt & Paper, with the twist that hands get passed around, so you need to strategise your next turn in advance, or more likely curse yourself for giving your opponent what they're after while trying to make the best of your selection, forgetting that the same thing will happen again. The cute Squishmallow sushi made it a hit with the six year old (let her have all the puddings), who was eager to head to the shop to try sushi again straight away, and apologised to the game for finding it "disgusting."
2013 / Card game / 2-6 players
**
An inevitable product and gift, she tends to use these more as a Guess Who than the proper game. It was good to see that no more thought was put into the stats than with the My Little Pony set, with Frankie Stein's SAT score of 1 making them considerably dumber than the overachieving pets.
Monopoly: Sailor Moon
2024 / Trading board game / 2-6 players
***
This was a bit of a Christmas dilemma when searching for affordable Sailor Moon stuff, but I wanted us to upgrade from Monopoly Junior anyway (which barely even counts as a game) and the curiously specific theming around the exact season of the anime we just watched (the best one) and the pieces doubling as shiny souvenir tat ultimately triumphed over my distaste for completely irrelevant board game adaptations, especially ones that nonsensically use characters in place of properties. How do you mortgage Tuxedo Mask? What the hell is going on???
None of this bothered the young player, who wanted to play it every day of the school holidays after Christmas (and had to be talked out of multiple rounds for the sake of sanity). We use the house rule of everyone starting out with three random properties characters, keeping games within a tolerable range of 15–90 minutes depending on who shuffled.
Star Realms: Rise of Empire – Backer Promo Pack
2024 / Deckbuilding card game expansion pack / 2+ players
****
This is mainly variety for its own sake, but Hero cards are new to me, since I'd avoided having people in my spaceship game before, and it's nice to see more docking action and double faction bonuses. Along with the Frontiers Promos, I've now got enough nu-school cards to separate the two eras (pre- and post-Frontiers) to suit almost imperceptibly different moods.
The Settlers of Catan
1995 (1997 edition) / Strategy board game / 3-4 players
***
Resold
The last of the modern board game trinity after Catan and Carcassonne, it looked to be a promising silver medallist (with bonus geographical and historical education angles helping to justify it as a family purchase), but the six year old showed no interest in playing with plastic trains, and it's not really one I can play against myself, so I had to settle for upselling it for minor profit.
2007 / Dice activity / 1+ players
***
With our existing sets being heavy on the nouns, this verby batch seemed a necessary addition to get full creative use out of the concept, so I set up a budget price alert about a year and a half ago that finally paid off. I now supposedly have everything I need to create endless roleplaying NPCs and situations on the fly, except perhaps for an optimally functioning mind.
2011 / Roleplaying game adventure / 2+ players
****
These laid-back prompts for an island trek were just what I was hoping for when the young player wanted to play 'Story Game' on the Catan board again with no preparation and I grabbed a trusty Adventure Anthology off the bookshelf. The map helped to populate the hexes (not to scale) with equivalent creatures, structures and morbid ambiance as our characters set about gathering wood to build a bridge across a narrow channel back to the mainland, even though one of us can fly and the others are capable swimmers. All those points put into Mind were clearly a waste.
2015 / Card game / 1-5 players
***
The most abstract of games was a charity shop steal (not literally), though sorting ascending and descending number piles isn't the most rewarding solo activity in my roster. It'll be more useful as maths practice when my daughter's a bit older, and not being allowed to warn young teammates about potentially costly mistakes is no doubt where the real challenge lies.
2004 / Board game variant / 2-5 players
****
This setup for two-player Cluedo worked a treat with a young player who enjoyed beating me to the rooms to steal the sequestered cards. She'll probably insist on it even when we have enough players for the normal game.
2015 / Economic card game rule variant / 1 player
****
My daughter likes to impress the select nobles she's impressed by, but her interest doesn't usually stretch to a full game of gem... conquest or whatever's going on, so I was glad to find some guy's solo house rules online.
The ever-dwindling supply seemed hopeless until I succeeded with one gem left in the stock on normal difficulty, so working up the levels could be a satisfying challenge when I feel like something lighter than Machina Arcana.
