Tabletop Toolbox - Top 10 Solo Games!

okay uh we're gonna let all that settle for a little bit uh and maybe what i'll do is um i know i'll record a top 10 video for my youtube channel about my top 10 favorite solo board games i think that's a that's a good idea so i've been kind of teasing doing this on a couple of comments and such on my youtube channel and i'm finally getting around to it but the truth is i've been kind of putting it off for a little while and there's two reasons why first of all i have found it very difficult to categorize what i would call my top 10 favorite games because while i can certainly say that i like a heavy euro game over a light gateway game when you start to get into those actual top 10 favorite games you realize that there's a lot more than just the game itself that comes into play you may find yourself asking who am i playing with what time of day is it is tomorrow or work day do i have time for all the lengthy setup do i really feel like teaching new players maybe this is a game that i just kind of like with a specific core group or a game that i'd rather play on a weekend when i've got all the time in the world which i really don't even have that so that's kind of a lot but anyways i decided to sort of narrow my field of vision to apply a couple filters if you will to help me to hone in on a specific uh you know lineage of games in this case solo games that i can speak a lot more confidently about and say that for sure yes i like to play this game more than this game in this particular setting with just me as my uh as the only player the other reason that i've been putting this off is well it's something that i'm actually a little more nervous about you see i got into making board game related content because i wanted to be a contributor for the dice tower of board game breakfast and i accomplished just that one of the things that they require though is that your videos have to be fairly short about two minutes in length and i think that even you could come up with any topic that you could talk about related to board games for longer than two minutes so in order to work with this requirement i got into the habit of making very diligent scripts for all my videos i write out every joke every line everything that i want to say all of my little nuances any of my you know sort of intentional pauses the changes in scene changes in camera angles and that kind of stuff and then i even sit down with a timer and i time myself going through each of those changes each of those scripts each of those paragraphs whatever to try and make sure that i'm going to be within that time limit what i think that does is make a video that's very concise it's clean i think it's it's professional looking and i also like to think that it's fairly entertaining however it can also make it a little cold it makes it a little hard to sort of stop and think about what you're saying and maybe delve a little bit more into a topic and sort of feel yourself engaging a little bit more with your audience so for the first time in tabletop toolbox history i'm going to do this whole video including the segment that you're watching right now without any script whatsoever i have a list of my top 10 favorite solo games i'm going to talk about and that's it so i'm really interested to see in how this is going to go and i'm anxious to hear your thoughts feel free to throw in some comments if you think i go down the rabbit hole too much and some of these games coming up certainly let me know and if you like the format i'll it's certainly something i will try to keep with maybe not perchance for the dice tower videos but definitely in my own content that i continue to produce so with that being said uh this is take number three i think it's also going pretty good so maybe we'll roll with this one and i'm gonna move on to the first game on my list this is number 10. all right here we go my number 10 game this is a theme you're going to see a bunch but i did want to start off with something you know a little manageable for my first game so this one's a small box game if you're pulling it out of a shipping container because this is on mars by vitale lacerda now i know what you're probably thinking here what in the world is on mars or any loser game for that matter doing on a solo games list and i understand what you're thinking uh this game kind of popped on this list almost a little bit by accident you see i recently or a little while ago did a four player game of on mars and as with any lacerda game it was a complicated game we had to revisit the rules many times you're kind of slothing through just everything that that game has to offer and when we were done it was it was a fun experience we all had a good time but you're sitting there and you're looking back at all the things that you missed or the little mistakes that you made or the the things that you realized you got wrong or maybe just didn't take advantage of and it kind of makes you think gosh i wish we could just sit right down and play this game again now that we understand it a little better well of course everyone had to go and so i sat there looking at this table just filled with all the components everything's still ready to go and i thought why don't i try this out solo and so i did and i actually really kind of liked it you know unlike a lot of uh la sergio's other games there there isn't a lot to manage in the solo experience of on mars games like escape plan and kanban uh you have multiple ai characters you have to manage multiple decks of cards multiple characters you have to move around the board on mars isn't quite that bad there's only one solo bot there's one deck of cards that kind of helps it go through its actions there's some interaction points and the spaces that it takes up on the board and there's a little bit of the flow charting mechanisms that you know if this then you do that that kind of a thing but it's generally pretty easy to manage the other thing that i like about it is that the game kind of knows you know i think lasado whoever made the solo rules they they kind of knew that it really wasn't going to be that tough so because of that just having a higher score than the ai isn't really enough to win the rules actually have a number of sort of tiers that you can reach and it's more than just beating the ai and score you have to get certain things done on the board you have to get your your operation center to a certain level you have to get so many science uh missions achieved or certain buildings upgraded or or a certain row of buildings in place there's there's other things you have to do than just beat the score and you can get you know obviously you want to try and get as many of those as you can to sort of reach those higher levels of victory but you know i don't typically like games that just say okay well this score wins but this score really wins and this score wins the most because i feel like those games know that they're swinging and they're just very luck-based but this is more than just different tiers of score it's it's tiers of score but also getting certain conditions met during the game play and i think that that just creates a better challenge to you the player okay yeah i gotta beat the you know the bot but i have to do more than just that so you're looking at all the different avenues of strategy uh you know a lot of his games use trigger points you go here and that may trigger something else and that may trigger something else and so using those to your advantage is how you're going to reach those higher tiers of victory in the solo game of on mars that's what i think of this one i also want to take a quick moment and i want to mention my number 11 game now i did this review by using a website called pub meeple and i'll put the link here pub meeple you can you can link it to your bgg account you can give it your list of games and it'll kind of help you pick okay i like this one more than that one it's very straightforward very easy to use this game on my last pass through my roster this game got compared against nemo's war which unfortunately i don't have a copy of as i've lent it out to a local gamer nemo's war is a big box solo only game yes there's there's some multiplayer rules but i've heard that they're not even really worth playing when these two games came up on the screen i really sat there and i looked at them and i really had to think about it now nemo's war is this big sprawling solo game like on mars it takes up a tremendous amount of table presence there's a ton of rules to get through nemo's war is more of a story based game you got this deck of cards that you kind of assemble at the beginning of the game and it can be very random from one play to the next and that's that's really great because every time you play it can be a different experience you can also kind of tailor your experience the beginning of the game are you going to go for exploration you're going to go for combat you're going to go for building insurrection there's a whole lot you can kind of customize into that game and that's great but unlike on mars it is a dice chucking luck fest uh every everything you do in that game is a roll the dice even if you're just trying to fix up your ship a little bit or let your crew rest up and regain some health you can still have bad luck in just trying to do that and i when those when those two games came up on the screen that's why i ultimately clicked on this one over nemo's award because this game is about strategy it's about picking the path through the actions and just trying to do the right things in the right order nemo's war you can have the best intentions you can go after all the right goals and you can just roll duds on every time and that's just how that game is going to shake out so very very different games very very different experiences and it really comes down to what you like in the game do you want something that can be kind of swingy because that's exactly how that game scores it's well if you get this score you kind of won but if you get this score then you super one and i just don't really care for that in a solo experience because okay well i won but i got the low score so what did i really accomplish right anyways that's my number 10 on mars and my number 11 nemo's war and now let's move on to number nine my number nine game is a little bit of a departure from the previous two actually that i just spoke about this is a city building game with worker placement and engine building mechanisms with a beautiful woodsy theme this is of course everdell by starling games which i think lives kind of right about here in my collection if i recall everedell is a beautiful game with an amazing table presence in which you are building a city of structures inviting little critters out in the forest uh against other players now i've certainly seen some comments from folks who who just everdel didn't click with them there are some folks who have had problems getting the engine building mechanisms to really work for them and they've struggled to get some decent scores and i can certainly understand that i've had a couple dud games myself to those folks i'd recommend if you want to give the game another go come to understand the value of simply having a handful of cards there's a lot of spaces on the board there's a lot of cards you can get into play and even the spire crest expansion really kind of forces you to do a lot more just by having cards you can trade them in for resources for other cards or for points at the end of the game inspire crest can even force you to have to pay additional cards as sort of a penalty if you will when you're trying to get something out in your city so come to understand just how beneficial it is to have a handful of cards as much as you possibly can and you may get the game to work out a little better for you on the solo front everdell is a very fast and efficient game anytime that you place a card into your city you roll a d8 die those numbers correspond to a space in the meadow and the ai obtains that card at the end of the game they score based on simply the colors of the cards that they've had uh they also have a little bit of a flowchart mechanism in that if they have all the cards they need to get an event they claim that event automatically and any events that you don't get throughout the game they get the score at the end of the game so you do have to kind of watch out for that little point bump at the game's end so i really like how fast the game plays if you put a worker down you grab a couple resources you immediately go again the ai doesn't even do anything i also really like the fact that everdell has rules for solo play in all of its expansions so if you want some huge grand experience using all the different components of everdevil you can certainly do that now i haven't done it myself because the setup and teardown time is pretty extreme in that version of a game but you can certainly do so if you're up for it i will also say that if you don't have everdel i don't know that i'd recommend getting it just for the solo play there are some elements of the multiplayer game that just don't come through in the solo game for example you could have certain cards out that kind of gives you a store that other players can visit throughout the game giving you some extra points there's no element of that at all in the solo game and it's kind of a letdown it's not a major component that you'll find lacking but there's just something about having all these different cities sitting around the main board that you'll definitely miss out in the solo game however it's very fast to play i think that if you're just using the base game you can probably set up play and tear down in maybe 30 minutes flat so it's really an excellent solo game and if you have it and just bundle you don't get it to the table more often or if you just haven't tried it i really recommend really recommend giving it a go that's my number nine everdell let's check out number eight [Applause] all right my number eight is back to a theme that i did say you would probably see fairly often in this video but this time it is actually a small box game this is deep space d6 designed by tony go now this is a solo only experience it's a pretty straightforward game you've got a deck of cards that will represent some threats or enemy ships or whatever it may be and you're in a spaceship of your own rolling dice to represent which crew members are basically going to show up to work that day you will then assign those crew members as you see fit to try and deal with any of the threats that are you're currently facing uh fairly straightforward you get some chances to re-roll kind of like you know a yahtzee sort of a thing and again you're just plucking those dice on those threats now what makes the game kind of interesting and maybe a little challenging is when those threats stack up in a certain way where they may nullify various results of the die so i've had instances where you can't use your captains until your engineers fix a problem but then you've got some sort of an issue and all of your engineers are tied up in sick bay for whatever reason and you just cannot get anything done and it is a very rapid death of your spaceship uh but it's like you know it those instances can happen but it's it's somewhat rare and you just kind of have to recognize when those things start to stack up which what you have to deal with in what order there's also an expansion for the game that i really like because it introduces super weapons and those are an extra set of cards that you can build in a particular order you have to build each super weapon in a particular order assigning crew members to it kind of one at a time and you can build up those weapons and they do make the game very overpowered for you you then become this just juggernaut of a ship and i really do like that mechanism in these games i like a game where you know maybe take a little while to get there it's a little bit of a challenge obviously you're you're spending resources to build a weapon instead of dealing with your other threats but once you get that done you can just decimate all of your foes and i just i enjoy playing that way straightforward game maybe a little hard to find he does reprints kind of when he can but it's a very fun game deep space d6 my number eight now let's check out number seven [Applause] let's stay amongst the stars for just one more round shall we because my number seven is a space-based combat action adventure game this is warps edge by renegade games it's an entry in their solo hero series which i did have to look up and spoiler alert there's only two titles in that series hopefully they'll get some more added soon warps edge is a bag building game which will have you as a solo combatant against an enemy mother ship and its fleet of minions now you play across multiple rounds or warps as they're called in the game and you run out of tokens to trigger the next warp at the beginning of each warp all of the enemy minions come back into play some of the enemy ships might be protected which means you can't attack them until all the minions are out of the way and that may require you to really beef up your bag before you have enough firepower to take out all the minions and still have some shots left to go up against the mothership now of course you start off with a couple default tokens these tokens may let you shoot at your enemies dodge enemy fire or charge up your ship to buy additional tokens there's also some power tokens and these differ based on which ship you're taking into combat these can let you spread attacks across multiple opponents charge up weapons for special effects and there's some other features in there as well the variability of the game definitely comes in as far as the ships that you take in the combat and the motherships that you go up against some of them can be pretty difficult like those protected ones there are others that are a little easier to get around and of course depending on which ship you take in the battle can really help you out as well once you come to really understand the effects of those power tokens but the game's pretty straightforward there's not a lot to it uh there's a lot of decision making you've got despite the luck uh elements of the bag and uh it's a pretty straightforward simple game that can definitely give you a little bit of a challenge so that is warps edge my number seven let's check out number six all right for number six it is time to leave space behind and maybe go somewhere a little more dangerous this is one of my all-time favorite games this is dinogenics by ninth haven games this is a work replacement game where you're trying to acquire dna sequences to get dinosaurs into your park safely independence for the amusement of your visitors and also for the amusement of those visitors you are trying to get amusement aspects in place in your park as well be it hotels or cafes or animatronic rides or just statues and that is on the surface alone a very beautiful and just challenging game however it also has some of those seedy underbelly elements that made the jurassic park movies what they are so there's a deck of asset cards and these things may give you access to the black market you could possibly steal dna you can do you know some counter espionage units you can hire some questionable workers to build buildings at a discount there's a lot you can do that sort of takes you underground a little bit in the thematic elements of this game and it is just fantastic now in the solo game there are a number of scenarios that you can play they will give you starting conditions that you may have to try and deal with you may have a couple of dinosaurs but no fences or you may just not have any money to start with and you've got to work your way through those puzzles they usually give you a certain number of turns to acquire a certain number of points and i'll tell you they're fairly difficult in fact i don't think i've beaten any of them but it is a fantastic way to just get this game to the table and play it is it worth it just for the solo experience that may be half that may have to be up to you i think i have played it solo about as many times as i've played at multiplayer and i just love seeing it on the table that it is worth it for me this is my number six dinogenics let's check out number five [Applause] all right but enough with the dinosaurs and the wild beasts it's time to get back to space and this time i'm gonna do so boldly because my number five is star trek frontiers now let's get this out of the way all right i grew up with my family watching star trek the next generation i've probably seen every episode that was ever made i didn't see any star wars until i was in high school and if i'm honest with you it just never really clicked with me now you may not be very happy with that answer and you're welcome to let me know but don't make me set my phasers to stun star trek frontiers is a re-skinning of the classic game mage knight this is a big sprawling adventure game in this game you kind of build a universe from a triangle from you know kind of starting from one point you've got planets to visit encounters to deal with enemy ships to deal with and maybe even the borg will show up it's it's definitely a lot in a single box and the rules uh will point that out to you very clearly the walkthrough guide to get started is 24 pages or 20 pages the main rule book is 24 pages and i think this is size 9 font in here too but this is a deck building game so you start off with a core set of cards based on whichever ship you choose and you get to pick a couple of extra decks to kind of work into the overall structure of your decks hey folks future jeff here future that not you know what never mind anyways i couldn't let this go to air without fixing a little mistake that i made here you see there isn't a deck construction element to star trek frontiers instead you start off with a basic set of cards relevant to the ship that you're taking into the game and they're pretty much all the same except for the one that represents your captain but throughout the game there will be a series of decks that sit on the table and these are ones that you feed into your deck throughout the game you've got undiscovered cards regular and elite crew members and some advanced action cards so with that set straight let's get back to what he has to say you get to level up your captain as you play this can unlock additional skills that will help you out throughout the game and you can also increase your deck size which just gives you more options to play with the beginning of the game in my experience can be a little slow but there's just a ton of variety a ton of options and that's what i think makes it feel like such a complex game with so many rules that you need to slog through to get started but it's a fantastic experience and i'll say this too as far as a couple star trek games go star trek fleet captains is a great game often described as star trek in a box but it doesn't really work solo it's pretty much a minimum two player game in fact i think it's only pretty much a two-player game there's some elements for i think three-player and teams but it just doesn't really work that well also there's star trek ascendancy which unfortunately i don't own i've heard that you can play with it solo if you get the borg expansion but i've also heard that it is incredibly difficult and it kind of makes you feel like you're not actually playing star trek from what i've been told i can't weigh in here i don't have it but if you're looking for a wonderful solo experience to put you in the universe of star trek star trek frontiers is the way to go that's my number five let's check out number four [Applause] for number four we stay in space but we will return to the 20th century because this is leaving earth a very curiously packaged and published game from a small independent arts and crafts company out in california called the luminaris group leaving earth i think sort of redefines everything that i thought about how a game can and should be played for starters there's no board instead you have a series of cards that you arranged on the table to sort of recreate our solar system you also play as a number of space agencies that existed back in the 1950s and you're playing through the 20-year great space race from that era in time other cards will give you various technologies that you will use either to build your rockets or to use these rockets and they're not just the components they're also certain things that you would do with a rocket such as surveying landing rendezvous with components in space life support and more there's also cars that represent the various components of a shuttle from the rockets themselves to the capsules you can hire astronauts you have to give them supplies to live out in space and more you've also got mission cards that you randomly draw from at the beginning of the game and these are basically giving you the challenges that you're trying to face in the game itself the solo game simply works in that you're trying to get as many points as you can so that you've earned more points by the end of the game than the points or the missions that you haven't earned it's basically that straightforward there is no actual ai that you play against what makes this game so unique though is that when you're moving from card to card in our solar system there are maneuvers there are difficulties for each of those maneuvers and you have to make sure that you have enough thrust to move the mass of your rocket through those maneuvers now the rulebook does a fantastic job of laying this out for you but you basically can't play this game without some sort of a spreadsheet or chart or something to track your maneuvers and even more so you have to do so in reverse you have to make sure that the last component that you're moving back to earth you have enough thrust to do that you then have to add those components those thrusters and compensate it for the previous maneuver for the previous maneuver and so on and so forth so again there's a lot of math and a lot of planning that you have to do in this game i think that's what makes it so good for solo play and that you don't have to sit and wait for another opponent another player to go through all those gyrations and all that math on their turn however because of that complex setup and just the fact that you need something on the side something that's literally not going to fit in this box to go through all that math is why this isn't quite as high on my list however leaving earth is a phenomenal experience i love the fact that when you're done playing you really feel like you have a story to tell you should have just seen this mission you should have seen what i was able to pull off and get this game won on the final year it was amazing check it out so this is leaving earth my number four let's come back to earth for number three all right listen up i'll give you a little reprieve from the space games but don't expect it to last very long listen i just love space games i'm not afraid to admit it but let's go somewhere different shall we like how about bavarian germany in fact how about we visit my number three favorite title this is holler towel which as of this printing is the latest big box farming game from legendary designer juve rosenberg this is also the first game on this list for which i've already made a review of here on my youtube channel so you're welcome to go and check that out and because of that i'm not going to delve super deep into the mechanisms or gameplay of this title but basically holler tau is a worker placement game that will have you putting workers out onto an action board and using those actions to try and get as many resources from your little village as you can you'll use those resources to upgrade some buildings in the village and if you can get those buildings upgraded far enough you can then upgrade the community center doing so gives you more workers and subsequent rounds and more points for the end of the game get 100 points and you win get 110 and you won very well i guess uh what i love so much about hauler tower and i talked about it in my review and also on the quick clip that i had out on the dice tower boarding at breakfast this game is just very chill it's very relaxing and the solo game especially is very neat because there is no ai element to work with at all there's no workers you have to place for the for the opponent there's no action you have to worry about taking for the opponent there's basically nothing that steps on your feet what that means is that each round is your turn and you can spend your workers in whatever order you want to try and maximize your profits from everything that you've got going in your village so for example if you want to harvest some wool from your sheep but you also want to get more sheep then obviously you want to try and get the sheep first so then you can harvest and get more wool from the additional sheep you don't have to worry about losing that action to an ai player that's really neat the only difference is and it's really not again it's not a difference it's the mechanism of the game you flip a card to beginning of each round and it shows you a quadrant that you take some workers off of which will free up some actions and make actions cheaper for your subsequent rounds but it may not free up the actions that you want so you still have to be strategic to try and make sure that you have enough resources to upgrade your village and get to the points that you need to win the game it's but it's just generally it's very relaxing you can like i said you can pick your path and then put your plan into action and it's a lot of fun i will say this however there's a couple different decks that you use throughout the game uh one that lets you get some additional resources another deck that lets you build production there's another deck that lets you get end game scoring and there are different decks that you can use for each play through the game each deck kind of focuses on a particular resource at least according to the rule book in my experience i haven't really noticed a tremendous amount of difference between those decks also you're not going to get that many cards of each deck throughout a single game so you could probably play with the same deck a couple times and still have a variety of cards that you haven't seen from one game play to the next so i kind of feel like after a handful of plays of this game i may have kind of seen just about everything that it has to offer and it kind of starts to get a little repetitive and okay i've been there i've done that so definitely take that into account when you're looking to purchase the game especially if you're only looking for solo play now listen it's holler towel germany it's holler towel hops one of the noble hops used in beer production so when i saw this game come out there was basically no doubt that i was going to get it and when i saw that it had a solo mode again it was kind of a no-brainer so take that into account going forward for sure that's my number three now let's get to number two all right this is game number two and monty python said it best when you said now it's time for something completely different we've spent a lot of time in space we did just leave hollertown germany let's go to i don't know victorian england sure why not because this is obsession by dan halligan now i've done a couple videos of obsession here on my youtube channel the basic story was my friends introduced me to it i had no interest in it we played it anyways i didn't like it at all but i just i kept thinking about the mechanisms of this game you've got deck building you've got worker placement you've got this kind of tableau city building or in this case a state building with a builder's market you're trying to slot upgrades into your estate and then you kind of have this this kind of party planning aspect where you're trying to to throw these events to attract the right people and it really just comes together very well it is a very very fun game now the problem i have with obsession is the multiplayer game it just can really drag you can run into some ap situations in the game maybe a move that you were going to make ends up just not working out or you kind of forgot something maybe your your uh your family is not up to the level you need to be to host a certain event or invite a certain person or maybe you used a worker that you kind of forgot you would use and so you could really kind of kind of sit there and and devise your strategy you got to change your plans kind of a lot throughout the game and so it just makes the game slow down a lot especially start getting up to three four players the solo game gets rid of all of that you take your turn you roll the dial for the ai it plucks a upgrade off of the builders market and you go right into your next turn there's a deck of cards that gives you a variety of opponents that you can play against so you don't have that whole thing of will you score this amount to to do well or this mount to do very well or this amount to do super great you just pick a card easy medium hard also short or long game variants and you play against that one opponent you beat it score you win the game it's that simple and i really like that there's also a solo estate challenge there's actually two modes of solo play but you do need the upstairs downstairs expansion to get that extra mode and that gets rid of this kind of courtship round where you're trying to attract uh the the love interest if you will of this other family and it just focuses on building uh the best estate and getting your families ranking up as high as you can get it so i just love the amount of variety in this box and for all the multiplayer games i've talked about that have solo variants this is probably the one that i would recommend getting for the solo experience alone it really streamlines the process it gives you the same experience gives you the exact same experience as playing multiplayer but just in the solo game but it's much faster and you you do still kind of feel like you had to work against this opponent to win and i really really like the way that it works out this is obsession my number two and now it's time for number one all right folks here we are my number one favorite solo board game now i'm sure at this point you're pretty much expecting that we're heading back to space and honestly who am i to disappoint you but you might be surprised to learn just how new this game is to my collection in fact it only came in about a month ago now luckily i've had a couple opportunities to play this both solo and multiplayer and those were all really good experiences but this game is so new it's not even out yet at retail this was a kickstarter game this is rocketmen by martin wallace and published by phallics now since this game is so new let me try and give you a quick rundown this is a deck building game that has one to four players working as non-descript space agencies trying to launch missions to a number of locations in our solar system you've got either the orbit of earth the moon or mars and there's four different missions you can attempt at each of those locations now the cards in the game let you do a couple things first they'll represent the missions themselves you'll slot one into your command center and that sort of dictates where you're trying to go they also represent money which you'll use to purchase upgrades for your space agency you'll also purchase the ability to put those cards on your launchpad so once you obtain them they go through your deck you can now put them out in the launchpad lastly a lot of these cards will give you special abilities icons or even benefits to your launches to help you be more successful now how does that work on the side of the board there's a track that runs from the surface of earth all the way up to mars with moon the moon on the way when you're attempting a launch you'll check the cards on your launchpad to see how far up that track you start from there you turn to the mission success deck this is a separate deck of cards with numbers on it ranging from zero to four the mission that you're attempting will tell you how many of these you can flip over adding the values to your to your spot on the track and if by the time you flip over the last card you've reached your destination then you are successful you gain a couple of points you get a permanent upgrade to your space agency and you pretty much clear your launch launchpad and get ready for the next mission now how does the solo mode work so the ai has a separate token that sits on that same track but it moves slowly up that track on every one of your turns ai doesn't really have its own turn it just activates on your turn if it's on the track it'll move one location at the start of your turn towards its destination and if it reaches that destination in that movement it scores its points and then takes the token off the track on your next turn if the token's not on the track you flip over two cards one tells you where the ai is heading and the other one tells you which mission it's attempting and between the two cards you'll glean the starting value for where that token is going to start on the track you simply place it on the track of that location and proceed with your turn now in addition to this you've got the storefront of cards on the board if you don't purchase any cards during your turn then the left card is discarded everything moves one space to the left and a new card comes out on the right when that store is completely empty the game is over so it's a built-in timer now here's one thing to note the ai will always move with its same pace as it approaches a mission it always moves one space on your term it's also starting off with an active mission and it's already on its way there which means the ai will get out ahead of you early in the game and you'll spend most of the game trying to catch up but the real challenge isn't trying to balance how you're spending your money yes you're trying to get cards into your deck but on the same token you've got to get those cards on the launch pad and you have to get missions in progress because that timer will run out very quickly and like i said you'll spend the entire game trying to chase down the ai so it's a very stressful very involved very challenging strategic solo game now i want to take a moment to compare this to leaving earth which i mentioned just a couple numbers ago i think leaving earth is a more grand experience when you get done a game of that you really feel like you have a story to tell but as i mentioned it's got a fairly lengthy setup and also pretty much cannot be played without some sort of a spreadsheet or chart or even a laptop running a spreadsheet on the side to help you plan out your missions you simply cannot do it all in your head compared to that rocketman is much more streamlined it's a little more bare bones there's not as many places that you can go to but i feel like that added tension is a really enticing feature in this game you see in leaving earth you can get yourself to a point where emission is 100 guaranteed success you can't really do that very well in rocket rocket man i mean you could but you get to a point it would take you so long to get to that point i should say that you're never going to be able to catch up to the ai so you have to be a lot more balanced in your approach in leaving earth you can kind of sit back and let your money work for you get everything researched up and then just bang out your missions very easily anyways i think rocketman is just a phenomenal experience it's a very beautiful presence on the table too especially if you get the upgraded game mats this game looks fantastic it plays very very well and it's just a lot of stressful fun and that's why rocketmen is my number one all right folks well that's it my top 10 favorite solo board games and the first video on my channel without any script whatsoever now this did take me a bit longer to put together than i thought it would i had to reshoot a number of videos including this one due to some equipment problems along the way believe it or not but i did learn a lot along the way and i do hope that you enjoyed the experience if you have any constructive criticism i'm certainly all ears but in the meantime i hope you enjoyed this list of games i hope you'll seek a couple out on your own and if you do then i really hope you enjoy your playthroughs as much as i have that's it for me though i'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up thanks a lot for watching cheers

Channel: Tabletop Toolbox

Views: 8,593

Rating: 4.8847737 out of 5

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Id: youhoVKUUc8

Length: 36min 36sec (2196 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021