Friends in High Places - solo card game

Last week I sketched a solo card game. After some play testing and converting the rules to English, here it is.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

This is a solo deck-building game that can be played with a regular 52-card deck. The goal of the game is to gain influence over the King of Diamonds. To reach that goal, you will need to influence other nobles higher and higher in the court.

Setup

Remove these cards: jokers, 2 of hearts, spades and diamonds, and kings of clubs, spades and hearts. Prepare your starting deck with the four aces, and the cards 2, 3 and 4 of clubs. Shuffle them well. Prepare the court deck by shuffling the remaining cards.

Playing the game

Follow these steps for each game turn:

1) Your nobles arrive at the court: deal four cards from your deck to make up your hand for the turn. If there are not enough cards on your deck, shuffle your discards to make a new deck. If at any time your whole deck (including discards) has less than 4 cards, you lose the game.

2) Other nobles arrive at the court: deal four cards from the court deck on the table, to make up the court. If there are not enough cards on the court deck, shuffle the court discards to make a new court deck. If at any time the whole court deck (including discards) has less than 4 cards, you lose the game.

3) Court intrigue: you must remove from the game either two cards from the court or one card from your hand. These cards will not be used for the rest of the game, so choose carefully!

4) Influence: now you can use cards from your hand to acquire one card from the court, respecting the following rules:

• The suits represent spheres of influence, in order: clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds.
• You can add the values of cards of a suit to acquire a card of the same suit with the same or lower value. Jacks are worth 11, Queens are worth 12, the King of Diamonds is worth 13. Example: you can use a 2 and a 3 of clubs to acquire a 5 of clubs that is on the court this turn.
• You can also add cards of a suit and use half of the total (rounded down) to acquire a card of the next sphere of influence. For instance, you can combine a 2 and a 5 of hearts (total 7, divided by two = 3) to acquire a 3 of spades. It is not possible to skip spheres (e.g. acquire a card of spades with a combination of cards of clubs).
• Aces can be used to reduce the value of a card of the same suit on the court. For instance, you can acquire a 5 of spades with the ace of spades and a 4 of spades. Likewise, you can acquire the 3 of hearts with the ace of hearts and the 2 and 4 of clubs.
• Cards of different suits cannot be added together. For instance, if your hand consists of 2 and 4 of clubs and 3 and 4 of hearts, you may acquire up to a 6 of clubs, a 7 of hearts or a 3 of spades.

5) An acquired card is placed on your discard pile. You immediately win the game when you acquire the King of Diamonds.

6) As the last step of the game turn, discard the remaining cards on the court to the court discard pile, and any cards you used or still on your hand to your discard pile. Go back to step 1 and keep playing more turns until you win or lose.

Variations

If the game seems too easy, try one or both of these optional rules:

a) Lost opportunities: After the court discard pile is shuffled (on step 2), turn open the first card. If it is the King of Diamonds, place it at the bottom of the court deck. Otherwise, remove it from the game.

b) Royal family: The King of Diamonds may only be acquired with other cards of the diamonds suit.

Maquis app for android

Maquis is a free solo print and play board game that uses the "worker placement" mechanic. It was on my "to-build" list for a while but recently I found that there is an app version of it.

My first game did not last more than three turns.

My first attempts at playing were laughably bad. When placing your characters, you must take care to keep an escape route back to the safe house. Otherwise, they get arrested. By lack of attention and planning, my three maquisards were arrested in few turns, thus ending the game. I still have to win a game in the Normal difficulty.

Flash Point

A couple of weeks ago I picked up my copy of Flash Point, a cooperative board game of firefighters trying to rescue victims trapped in a house on fire, before they perish or the house crumbles.

My first solo game of Flash Point, in "family mode": fires raging, building about to crumble...

In 2011 (time flies!) I wrote about non-combat scenarios in miniature games and sketched some house rules for emergency response teams in Chain Reaction. Flash Point does that very nicely with a modular set of rules: there is a basic set of actions for the "family game" that are supplemented by advanced rules. Players have a number of action points to spend moving their units, opening doors, putting out fires, and rescuing victims.

Playing in advanced mode: the building crumbles while I was rescuing the fifth victim (out of seven).

The board is used as a scenario for this rules framework -- It should not be very hard to create your own custom boards and the game designer encourages players to come up with new rules and variations at the end of the manual. Overall, a fun and challenging, solo-friendly board game.

Last Fortress

Recently, I received another brazilian board game that was produced through crowdfunding. "A Última Fortaleza" (or The Last Fortress) is a cooperative and competitive game for three players, who control the armies of evil -- green skins, undead and a dragon with a cult -- in their last stand against the forces of light.

It takes a table at least 3' x 4' to fit all components comfortably.

Gameplay is inspired by "tower defense" games, as well as other strategy titles. Over a maximum of eight turns, players must construct buildings and produce units to mine resources and fight the invaders. Each turn, more invaders enter the map and all of them move towards the fortress.

While players must cooperate to survive, at most one of them will be the winner -- either the one who completes their army's objective or the one with the most influence. On the other hand, defeat is collective. For instance, if the leader of one army gets killed, or the fortress is completely destroyed, all players lose.

There are also other game modes but in my opinion this one is the most interesting. A "campaign mode" is scheduled to be released in the upcoming months, offering the possibility of solo play.

Rallyman!

Solitaire Games on Your Table is a BoardGameGeek thread where people tell about the board games they have been playing solo. There are some fun reports and it is also a good source of suggestions for games that can be played alone.

One of the games that is often mentioned is Rallyman, a board game simulation of rally races for up to four players. You are trying to make the shortest time, by taking risks while speeding over bumps and sliding on curves. A regular game consists of completing three tracks or "special stages", which are built by using the modular board. You can combine dirt and snow-covered tracks of different lengths. I got this game last weekend and played a few races.

Two boards combined to make some tracks. The reverse side has snow-covered tracks.

Playing Rallyman solo involves setting up a track and trying to make the best time possible. This will require some luck because, for each movement you take, you must roll a die that may land on a "danger" face. Accumulating three of those in a turn causes you to lose control of the car, which may cause damage or even make you abandon the race. Curves also have speed limits and if you go above them, you lose control. Overall, there is a good "simulation" feel of speeding up and slowing down the car as you move around, and making tight curves or sliding your way around them. For those who are curious, a revised manual of the game can also be found on this link on BoardGameGeek.

Making a move: each die rolled equals moving one space.

The production quality of the game is also very high. The boards and other pieces are made of very thick cardboard, the thickness of the cards is also great and the miniature cars look good. My only complaint is that the dice are not etched but rather painted (and thus might wear with time).

Conclusion
Rallyman offers a good solo challenge, and the combination of short set-up time and modular board means it can be played often: if I do not have much time, I can just make a single track instead of a regular race comprised of three tracks. I also do not see a reason why I could not draw new tracks on a large sheet of paper, if I ever come to a situation when the standard tracks are not challenging anymore.

Friday the 13th Solo Gaming

Today someone started a discussion about games that go well with Friday the 13th, in a Facebook group about board games that I follow. This spurred me to revisit some solo games related to the horror theme.

The first was good ol' Zombie in my Pocket, one of the first print and play games I have built. I had not played it in a while and surprisingly, I got my second victory ever! Here is the final game state: just one development card before game over, and saved from the four zombies (as I had only 3 health) by the oil + candle combination! I would rather have this kind of luck on the lottery but anyway... fun game.

The second was Dice of the Living Dead, another print and play game. I reached about 2/3 of the way to salvation, when my last (infected) survivor succumbed to a zombie attack. I was also pretty low on supplies and ammo.

Lastly, I played Elder Sign, pitting investigator Amanda Sharpe against Great Cthulhu... in the end, the ancient one awakened when I needed only one more elder sign (out of 13) to seal it off. As expected, she was defeated in battle, losing all sanity and almost all stamina. On the bright side, besides almost winning, I went through the whole game with a single investigator.

Some may argue that Friday 13th has more to do with bad luck than horror. Solo games often have a strong random element (to keep things unpredictable) and this is surely true of these three, so they match the day's theme in this case too.

Zombicide and solo scenarios

Today I spent some hours playing Zombicide and this got me thinking about solo tabletop gaming scenarios.

One problem that solo games must address is providing challenge for the players, and the solution often comes in the form of unpredictability. In the case of Zombicide, for instance, there are the card decks for zombies and items.

However, there is also the issue of setting up the game, that is, giving context to the action that is about to happen. Many rule sets have generic scenarios (i.e. attack or defend) and some have scenario generators. While useful, these often lack in depth or leave too many details for the player to fill.

This can be a problem for solo gaming, as setting the terrain in a mindful manner implies thinking about the tactics that can be used there. It can work if you want to explore different tactical situations in a given board. If you want to be able to play against the rules, it can feel as you have an unfair advantage.

One possible solution is to look for scenarios built by other people on the Internet. The problem is that in many cases, these will require miniatures, models or terrain that the player does not have.

The interesting thing about Zombicide is that, being a board game with a definite set of components, it is easier to share scenarios created for it. The official site has over 40 scenarios just for the base game and even an application to aid creating new ones.

I do not have any concrete proposals at the moment for this. On one hand, I enjoy the freedom given by tabletop games, i.e. I can set up a board with anything at hand. However, at times I may be stumped at creating any scenario, or may make one that is too favorable for one side.

In the end, I think that the relevant question is: how are other tabletop gamers creating their scenarios for play?

My first 2014 print and play board game: Jasper and Zot

Today I built and played Jasper and Zot, a solo boardgame that won first place in the 2011 "one full-sheet label game design contest" on BoardgameGeek. It is an easy project, with a single sheet (in color or monochrome versions) that contains the board and markers and two pages of rules. Since you need to draw the markers from a cup, it is advisable to mount them in cardboard or some other thick material.

Gameplay involves turning zombies into flowers and then burning those flowers and any adjacent zombies for points. The challenge is in trying to set up long chains of flowers and zombies that will result in a good score, while protecting your pumpkins at the end of the garden. Each turn, you roll two dice to determine how many new zombies will appear, and in which position. The zombie markers are drawn from a cup.

It is a nice little game that has minimal setup time and plays fast. The board and markers are also great. As a result this is a nice game to spend some time. There are also digital versions for iPhone and Android devices, just look for "Jasper and Zot" in the related app stores.

Building some print and play games

It is print and play time again! I intend to use some time during my vacation to build paper models and games. For now I have started with three easily buildable projects, all of them solo boardgames:

Jasper and Zot, a nice and portable solo board game that won a BoardGameGeek contest in 2011 for print and play games that fit in a single sheet.

Dice of the Living Dead, a solo zombie survival game that can be played with just the single-page board and eight dice.

Island of D 2: The Shadow of Dawn, a clever solo adventure that uses only cards, not dice for all the random elements and conflict resolution.