Why I Won't Play a Game Solo

Spirit Island has a genuinely well regarded solo mode, and I have never played it by myself, not once, not even to learn the rules before teaching someone else. Earthborne Rangers is basically designed for solo play first and a table second, going by how the community around it talks about it, and it’s the one real exception to all of this, the single solo campaign I’ve ever actually stuck with and finished. Everywhere else, the pattern holds. This isn’t an accident and it isn’t laziness. I finally sat down and worked out why, mostly because Deb asked me directly and I didn’t have a good answer ready.

The honest version is that I don’t actually want the game. I want the specific texture of another person’s reaction to the game, the moment where Deb figured out a combo on her own before I’d explained it, the way Marcus groans a very specific groan when a die goes against him that I have never once heard from a bot deck or an automated solo variant. A game by myself, even a genuinely good one, is a puzzle. A game with someone else across the table is a puzzle plus a live audience for whatever’s happening in my own head while I solve it, and it turns out the audience part is not optional for me, it’s most of the appeal.

I tried to test this honestly rather than just assert it, so I went back to the one game where I already knew the exception was real. Two weekends back I sat down with Earthborne Rangers again, on my own, in my own apartment, no distractions, the same solo campaign structure that had actually held my attention through to the end once before, and I still only got through about forty minutes before I noticed I was checking my phone between turns in a way I never do at Marcus’s table. Same game. Same cards. Same decisions to make. The only variable that changed was whether another human being was sitting there also invested in the outcome, and that variable turned out to matter more than I expected going in, even for the one game that had gotten past it before.

I want to be fair to the other side of this, because plenty of people I respect genuinely love solo gaming and get something real out of it, a controlled, quiet, no-scheduling-conflicts kind of satisfaction that a group game structurally can’t offer. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I’m actually chasing when I open a box, and pretending otherwise, telling myself I’d get around to trying the solo modes eventually, was starting to feel like a small dishonesty I didn’t need to keep carrying around.

So the solo rulebooks stay in the box, unread past the first few pages, and Spirit Island stays a game I only play with at least one other person in the room even though I could technically run four spirits by myself on a slow Tuesday. I’d rather wait for Thursday.