Top 20 Solo Board Games (10-1) SideGameLLC

howdy this is mackenzie franklin from side game llc here in colorado springs colorado today we're going to finish my top 20 solo board games of all time as of march of course 2021 but before we do this i do want to add one single honorable mention on this list and that is going to be bullet from level 99 games so bullet is a brand new addition to the side game library and i have been thrilled with it so far so it's only been here for less than a week and i don't know where i put it on this list but i do want to mention it here because i think this game is wonderful it is a puzzle game where you play as a heroine that is facing on these incoming bullets so they're going to be little pieces that are coming in on this grid in front of you and your job is to manipulate these pieces to form patterns in order to get rid of them off your board when you do that you either send them to another player if you're playing competitive or if you're playing with the solo version you will send them to a boss that you're fighting so this game features a bunch of heroines and on the back of each heroine is a boss for that specific heroin so they all play differently every of one of these heroines acts differently as well and it's a really interesting puzzle and challenge it really changed the way i think about puzzle games and it really challenges me and i really enjoy this game it's a quick playing game and it's one that i find myself coming back to a lot i really like this so this would rank very highly on this list but i'm not sure exactly where so i'm going to cover it here in an honorable mention and that's a bullet wonderful puzzle game i recommend you give this a try without further ado let's go ahead and get started with my 10 through 1 solo games of all time so this is going to be number 10 sleeping gods in sleeping gods you play as the captain of the manticore who's wandered your boat into the wandering sea your job is to find totems in order to return home there are many other stories and paths that you can find as you play but that's the main gist of things you are going to explore and try to find these totems so my favorite part of this game has to be the fact that you have this entire crew that you get to control and i think it's a lot of fun it seems a little daunting at first where you have all these different people to deal with but the controlling itself isn't bad these characters are more of resources than they are full-fledged characters like if you're playing a a game where you play a specific person so you're kind of able to manage these people as you see fit which is a really cool puzzle another thing i really enjoy is the challenge system whenever you try to do something you're going to be able to commit characters to add their skill icons to that challenge you'll then reveal a card from a deck and it's pretty cool because you can kind of choose and manipulate the odds on this deck that you're playing with and you get an additional bonus and even if you fail the challenge generally you're going to still get something for passing but you might suffer some type of mishap if you do fail so it's not the end of the world if you do fail which is really cool i like this system i really like the way they handle this exploration here and i think it's the best at exploring the best game for exploration hands down that's my number 10 sleeping gods my number nine is going to be a small bag building game called warps edge now this is a solo only game but in it you're going to play a fighter pilot and your job is to take down these giant waves of enemy fighters as well as a gigantic boss so you're going to be going through wave after wave of aliens with your ship now my favorite part of this game is a the ships themselves so when you choose your ship it's going to have some cool ability but also its own unique set of ability pieces so you're going to take those pieces and put them into a bag and as you play you're going to be pulling them out and you can use them for cool things some of the pieces will go into this market that you can purchase so you can really customize your fighter as you see fit and sometimes you'll even get rewards and get new chips that way for taking out specific fighters so i really love the way the system works i find that it's a great one to pick up and get right into and have a blast with and that's warpsedge i really like this one and i'm very excited to get those nice tokens and the plastic ones so really nice that's my number nine warps edge number eight is a another adventure style game but campaign driven and this is going to be arkham horror the card game so in this game you play as an investigator taking on some type of mystery it could be the mystery of insanity it could be a mystery of a lost temple it could be the mystery of a town and you're trying to solve some sort of overarching mission from campaign game to campaign game so really fascinating the structure of the game it is a deck constructing game where at the beginning you're going to pick an investigator and build a deck that's going to be able to take on all the challenges that you'll be facing in the campaign you've decided on so my favorite part of this game is that customization i love being able to pick a character and figure out what kind of deck i'm going to build in order to be able to take on all of the challenges that that will be thrown at me the hardest part of this game is the challenge of playing a single character because the game is very difficult it's very hard to do and when you're playing as a single character you need to make sure that you can kill things you can need to make sure you can investigate well and you got to make sure that you're able to survive just in general so there's a lot to plan there's a lot to think about when it comes to playing the card game but i think that the challenge and the adventure and the level up system that are presented here are absolutely wonderful now it's not as high as my other lists because i do prefer this at higher player counts i love the cooperation between the different characters but as a solo game you can just play two characters if you want it's not the way i like to play the game i find it a little hard to manage multiple large decks at once but i think it's definitely something that if you wanted to do the combination of characters you could definitely try it that way so i really like arkham horror the card game my number eight my number seven has you traveling around the caribbean this is maracaibo you play a group of mercenaries that are going to be hiring crew members and going on quests and exploring and fighting throughout the caribbean during your adventure the solo mode of this game is really cool you have a simple deck of cards that runs an enemy opponent and they're going to be doing the same thing going around exploring different cities interacting with the board and with the combat that's happening and it's a very straightforward system i think it does a great job now my favorite part of this game is the way the game evolves it has this story deck that you'll be using when you play and you can use it when you play competitive or when you play solo so you have a chance to kind of go back and forth between the two and the game does not discriminate you don't need to make sure the same people are playing all the time so it's really easy to just throw it the way the deck works is it adds new components new cards new pieces to the board and it really has the game evolve and it's a lot of fun it's cool to follow the little story but the card play is why i stay this has a lot of multi-use cards and one of my favorite aspects is these cards you can play you some of them have characters that actually appear on the board and go visit them and interact with them and i think that's a lot of fun to be able to have you know a person that you've you've hired to go do something and you catch up with them later i think that's a blast maracaibo is a great experience a wonderful multi-use cards and an awesome story system that it has incorporated so that's my number seven maracaibo my number six is a much larger game and this is a huge campaign game this is called ether fields so in ether fields you play as a dreamwalker your whole goal is to discover why you're here and what you need to be doing so it's kind of nebulous what you're really doing but ultimately you're going to be going through dreams and each dream has an objective that you fulfill as you go through each stream you unlock new dreams as well as obtain um a path to an ending and so the two different campaigns have a very similar structure but the way that they structure the way that you're actually going to be interacting with the dreams is completely and wholly unique and this game is a deck building driven game where you're going to have a character with its own personal deck and you're going to be building that deck up with the experiences that you will go through throughout the story so my favorite part of ether fields has to be the dreams themselves um you'll be going through these small slumbers that have you kind of going through mini events and traveling around a map but once you get to a dream this dream has a very unique setting and the way that it will interact with the world itself with the way that you're going to be laying the cards out on this board it's so fascinating how they're able to take these really cool and abstract concepts and put them into a physical card game form so i really enjoy the creativity and the adventure in this game there is a new way to play this game where you're simply just going to the dreams you can skip the slumbers so if you check in with awakened realms they have a way that you can ignore the slumbers a lot of people have criticism with that which i can understand but if you just want to get into those really cool dreams you can play on this basically i think it's called fast mode or speed mode something like that so lots of cool alternative ways to play this to make sure it's a experience that you're going to enjoy but man those dreams really really fun this is one i couldn't put down i'm already finished with the two campaigns and i just want more i'm i'm really excited for when they're going to release the expansion content so wonderful game ether fields my number five is another wonderful brightly colored game a little bit drastically different from ether fields there but this is spirit island i'm noticing that i have a lot of themes of being out in the ocean or being on an island so but this one in particular is a wonderful strategy game in spirit island you play as an a gigantic spirit and your job is to protect your land from invading colonists so these colonists are going to blight your land so you need to rise up and gather the forces of the natives that are living on the island and repel these colonists so the game itself has you playing with wave after wave of incoming colonists and your job is to either scare them away or eliminate them completely and you're going to do this by playing power cards and that's my favorite part of this game are the cards themselves it's totally card driven you're going to be playing these cards that are either slow or fast the fast ones you'll use right away they're generally a little bit weaker but they allow you to affect the board immediately slow powers are generally much stronger and they allow you to do really cool things but you'll have to wait to let the colonists react first so i love the balance between figuring out what you need to do now and seeing if you can wait for later and that is provided in spirit island each spirit is completely unique and they even start with their own personalized set of these slow and fast powers so you're going to feel different right from the get-go and the challenge this poses with the variable scaling difficulty you can add scenarios to it there's just a lot to love about spirit island it's a fantastic game i love the cards i love the spirit i love the theme i love the artwork they did a great job with this whole production i can't recommend this highly enough fantastic game that's spirit island the next game is called too many bones in too many bones you play as a gear lock not quite an elf but something else you're a gear lock and your job is to save the land from a tyrant that is terrorizing it so in too many bones you're going to take your own personal character take them from small encounter to small encounter and each time you participate and encounter generally you're going to be able to level up your character until you're finally ready to take on this giant tyrant where you have all of your skills and buffs that you've achieved as you've gone through and you're able to take it out so i really enjoy this game i love that progression and i love the combat system as well the combat system is very simple it's a small 4x4 grid where you have a stack of poker chips that represents you either chip on top as you your character and then you've got a bunch of little health chips on the bottom the enemies are represented the same way so your job is to tactfully move around this board and really decide where you need to be putting your damage your hits your protection your defense and the best part of this game in my opinion are the characters they're so rich with decisions and choices and each of them comes with their own set of skills the game is a little challenging and they have a way that you could play with just two extra health bumps at the beginning i do recommend that if you're learning this game because it is harder at lower player counts but this one is great at all player counts and being able to set up on an adventure on your own is a lot of fun now the solo in particular in this game they have specific events that are just for solo players so i really like that they took that extra time to set up that detail so you could really have a great time on your own so really like this one that is too many phones my number three is another new one to the library but this is one we've had for a couple months now and i can't get enough of it i'm super surprised because the theme is pretty generic and this is a farming thing it's a game called hollertow by uve rosenberg this is his latest of his kind of farming work replacement style games and this is one that i find myself coming back to a lot i can't get enough of it so in holler towel you play a family of farmers and your job is to basically cultivate many different types of goods in order to feed these specific houses so it's a very weird system it's kind of hard to describe here but basically you have these five houses that all require different resources and your job is to generate resources in order to push these buildings and so basically feed each of the buildings each round so you can have ways where you can feed them multiple times but ultimately you want to get these houses all the way from one end of yours like starting player board all the way to the end it's a weird one to describe but you gotta trust me when i tell you that this game is super engaging super clever and super fun so the game itself is a work replacement game that uses a really interesting mechanic where the board itself has spots for three sets of workers if you're the first person to go to a spot it costs just a single worker for the second person it'll cost two and then the third row has spots for three so potentially you could even visit the same spot multiple times in the same round but it'll just cost you more people each time so it's about being opportunistic on cheaper spots while guaranteeing you're actually taking actions you need or you want to take so i really like the worker placement first but the thing that keeps me coming back to this game is are the cards so in this game you're going to have a set of four different cards two will be used in every game these are production cards and end game scoring cards but you also have these two special cards you have these gateway cards and these uh like business cards and each of these allow you to take different strategies in order to achieve really cool neat little bonuses so i covered this in my gonshan's clever overview but getting little bonuses throughout a game and being able to combo bonuses is super satisfying and this game does it really well with you constantly getting new cards being able to just take actions to get more cards and then being able to fulfill multiple cards and the best part about fulfilling those cards and getting those bonuses is you can fulfill them at any time so you can do really cool plays where you're like setting up for specific combos and i think it does a great job at what it sets out to and it also has this really cool crop rotating mechanic so the main draw here of the farming is you have like these fields in front of you you'll be planting these things you'll be planting vegetables and when you pull them out the fields will decrease in their efficiency because you've used the soil already it's not as fertile but if you let the your fields lay and you don't use them for round they actually increase in efficiency because they're getting more fertile so i really like that system i like seeing it play out and the game itself is just satisfying and fun to play i think holy towel is wonderful if you have any interest in the farming theme and it's a wonderful solo and multiplayer experience so i really like holler towel wonderful game my number three my number two is another card driven game underwater cities so in underwater cities you're going to be in the oceans and your job is to build this habitable land for the population of humanity now the game itself has you playing cards when you're going to worker spots and that's the core mechanic you'll go to a space on the board and you'll use one of the cards in your hand and if the colors match you actually get to do the effect on that card now this is really fascinating because the spaces on the board vary in strength the green spaces are not very good the yellows are really strong and then the red are somewhere in the middle so weak a little medium power but the cards are inverse so the green cards are super strong the yellow cards suck and the reds are okay so i really love the decision of do i want to make sure i use the action space or do i wait to make sure i can play a card that fits with that action space or is my card so good that i'm willing to take a weaker action so it's really fun to kind of piece your puzzle together of deciding when you need to take actions and play cards and the huge variety of cards means that every game you play this is going to be vastly unique i think it's one of the reasons i like holler tower 2 the card system and the card comboing and figuring out your plan is super wonderful and another great thing about this game probably my favorite part is you get to see your civilization grow you're going to be expanding on your own personal board and you get to watch as your production goes up your ability to do more increases as you play and the more you play the stronger you feel and i think that's just a super satisfying thing in a game so i really like underwater cities that's my number two wonderful game my number one game is uh coincidentally my favorite game in general and i think it's because i play it so much because it is a wonderful solo game it's my favorite solo game to pull out and this is going to be marvel champions so marvel champions has you playing as a marvel superhero and it's a scenario based game so you're going to take your deck of heroes and you'll pair it with a villain and you'll go at it and you'll just have this fight and your job is to take out the villain before he completes his scheme or you need to take out the villain before he takes you out right so you have those two things you're kind of teetering on making sure you survive and the villain doesn't complete their scheme and then you can hopefully take them out so this game is just marvel and it is super fun i feel like i'm the superheroes that i play and the the game itself its biggest strength is the deck construction and the deck building as well as the scenario play so it's got a lot of strengths but let's talk about the deck building first so the game itself whenever you pick a hero you'll take their hero card and then 15 signature cards that go with that hero so unlike other deck building style games like this deck construction i say i should say you have basically half of your deck done already when you pick the hero which is really cool it seems like it would be limiting but it is really cool that you're kind of constricted because it decreases the amount of kind of things you have to think about when going into building a deck it's very easy to pick a character and it's very easy to build a deck for them it's not super daunting where it might be in some of these larger games where each of your card choices really matters so in this one you are going to be building a deck but you have that limited scope so in addition to your 15 cards that are a given every round you also have an aspect that you choose it could be leadership justice aggression protection you pick one of these aspects so you've got your character you've got your aspect and then you can use neutral cards to kind of fill in the in-between and that's it the deck construction is wonderfully straightforward wonderfully simple and really easy to get into it's one that you can throw somebody into and say hey yeah just pick a couple cards from this faction that you think looks fun and pair them up with your own hero cards and boom you're ready to go it's really easy to get into this game you can pick and choose and it's a cooperative lcg so it's very easy to pick and play with whatever you like i we have all the content in our library and i've enjoyed every single second of it it's a blast the other largest strength of this game is the scenario system because it is so easy to pick up and play this is one where you can pull it out play have a great time and put it away and then bring it out later you're not committed to any large campaigns you are committed to this single experience and that experience is whatever you'd like it to be whatever hero you want whatever villain you want to fight against and the amount of content that this game is getting you can customize your experience to the t so marvel champions my favorite solo game and a wonderful experience for anybody who enjoys the marvel franchise who enjoys card comboing play it is just a lot of fun and i see myself playing this for as long as they keep releasing content and hopefully until you know until yeah it's always until they quit releasing content hopefully even after they stop releasing content fantastic game marvel champions so that's my list my top 10 so my top 10 was today top 20 all time thanks so much for watching if you have any comments about what i talked about here please leave them down below if you agree with me tell me what you think i want to know what your favorite solo games are and what should i be trying or what should i be i'd be looking at there's obviously a lot of games i didn't cover here majority of games in the library do have solo components i have tried most of them but these were the 20 that i thought really stick out the most and these are ones that i gravitate and come back to just for fun so i really enjoy these i really enjoy coming back to these and man i if you haven't tried solo gaming i strongly recommend it it's a blast and marvel champions i think is a great way to get started so core box get one it's wonderful super fun thanks so much for watching everybody side game strong

Channel: SideGame LLC

Views: 9,114

Rating: 4.9190283 out of 5

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Id: vYCmsHfnrVo

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021