Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — solitaire

Like many folks these last few weeks, a lot of my recent gaming has been solitaire. This isn't all that unusual for me: I tend to spend a fair amount of time playtesting things solo to ensure that they are mechanically sound before I inflict them on other human beings. (That's a lesson I quickly learned in my salad days after a particularly disastrous playtest which ended with all my testers regarding me with a disconcerting and piteous mixture of bug-eyed horror and strained, polite smiles.) That's probably my primary reason for playing games solitaire - as part of my...

I used to be very wary of solitaire wargames. Not, mind you, of playing two-player wargames solitaire, but of honest-to-gosh solitaire designs. Partially, my reticence was somewhat aspirational: I might be playing both sides in this WW2 game, but the possibility existed that someday, someone who would dig the game would be sitting on the other side of the table. Whereas if I plunked down some of my hard-earned cash for a solo-only title, that possibility - however rarified and improbable - no longer existed. And, when you're on the sort of budget where you can only buy maybe five...

Ensi is my solitaire civilization-building game set in the fertile crescent during the Bronze Age. It was originally envisioned as a legacy style game of sorts, only without all the stickers and torn up cards and writing on the board. So, more like a campaign game, where certain things carry over from session to session, with each subsequent session adding new challenges and wrinkles. Each time you would build a new civilization, rising from the ashes of what had come before.  It sounded like a neat idea at the time - summer of twenty-seventeen if I recall correctly, though it...

I used to be very wary of solitaire wargames. Not, mind you, of playing two-player wargames solitaire, but of honest-to-gosh solitaire designs. Partially, my reticence was somewhat aspirational: I might be playing both sides in this WW2 game, but the possibility existed that someday, someone who would dig the game would be sitting on the other side of the table. Whereas if I plunked down some of my hard-earned cash for a solo-only title, that possibility - however rarified and improbable - no longer existed. And, when you're on the sort of budget where you can only buy maybe five...