It’s never been a better time for solo games. There’s so many to choose from, with more being published all the time.
During the lockdown, I discovered just how engaging solo games can be. I’m particularly drawn to games that offer captivating narratives, drama, and lots of replayability that all help bring the game alive and keep it fresh and challenging each time I play. And I really like games where I can turn up the difficulty as I learn the game and improve.
In selecting the games in our list we considered a few criteria that are common among all our favorites.
What Makes a Solo Board Game Great?
Adjustable difficulty: What makes solo board gaming great? This is a must-have for me. I love a game that’s easy to get into but has the depth to challenge me as I get better. A couple of the games on my list allow you to dial in the difficulty rating, very precisely – and I’m here for it. For me, it’s also crucial that it has a hard mode. Not because I’m an elite player, by any means, but, in solo, I rely pretty heavily on the chance of losing to create the drama and keep my interest.
Drama: This can come from a lot of mechanics, but luck of the draw or a roll of the dice can go a long way when creating a state of unpredictability. I prefer this because it keeps the game tactical, so that I’m responding to a changing game state, rather than a solely strategic venture. It can also comes from story or a strong narrative progression that keeps it feeling like a puzzle that can simply be solved with enough playthroughs.
Complex decision-making: A game where each turn is a new discovery, not a math problem waiting to be solved. The unpredictability keeps things interesting and ensures I’m not just going through the motions.
Potential for loss: This might seem like a strange thing to call attention to, but often in solo games you will earn a score, and, over time you attempt to improve and beat that score – and that’s the game. There’s no winner or loser. And it’s true, a couple of games on my list are set up that way, so it’s not a deal breaker, but I definitely prefer a game where there’s a real risk of losing. That’s, in part why I like adjustable difficulty, so I can dial in the right level of loss to keep me interested, but making sure I get enough wins to keep it fun.
What are the Best Solo Board Games?
Grove: a Nine-Card Solitaire Game
Publisher: Side Room Games Players: 1 Time: 5-10 minutes
How To Play
In Grove, your objective is to improve your orchard and achieve the best possible citrus harvest. You’ll play cards from your hand to align different types of citrus. When you do you’ll place dice showing how much fruit your trees have produced.
As you place more cards, the yields will scale, and achieving a perfect alignment in your expanding grove later in the game can be challenging, but the more citrus you produce, the higher your score.
Why You Should Be Playing This Game
Sometimes, you don’t have time for a deep campaign game with lots of set-up and fiddly bits. That’s where Grove comes in.
This game comes conveniently packed in a tiny box, about the same size as a box of crayons or a deck of cards. Don’t be fooled by the size because Grove offers a nice, variable puzzle that gives you a new challenge every time you shuffle up the cards.
Grove is perfect for travel or for a quick game during lunch breaks. I like it for winding down before bed, when I don’t have the mental energy to set up a big game. This one gives me a quick challenge, without any fiddliness. Just a great little game.
We earn a commission if you make a
purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Coffee Roaster
Publisher: Stronghold Games Players: 1 Time: 10-30 minutes
How To Play
Coffee Roaster is a solo bag-building game that challenges you to craft the perfect cup of coffee. Players will be adding tokens to their bag as they go through the roast phase and attempting to remove smoke or damaged beans. You’ll need to decide when to stop and prepare your cup, hoping that you’ve set up your bag so that you can accomplish the goals for that particular blend.
You have to be careful not to over roast (or under roast) your beans and you’ll need to be conscious of things like acidity and aroma that will also impact the balance of your cup. If you are able to reach a certain score you can progress to a more challenging cup.
You can test your coffee roasting skills on all kinds of beans from across the world that present different challenges and require a different approach to set yourself up for success. The game suggests playing an easy roast, medium roast, and hard roast in sequence and then tallying up your score.
Why You Should Be Playing This Game
If you are a coffee lover, the theme is on point! I’ll admit that this game doesn’t often come out at night, but rather on a weekend morning when I can enjoy it with my morning coffee, though I’ve heard that people like to drop a few beans in the box, so that, no matter when you play, you are greeted with the aroma.
Full disclosure, I might be a little biased toward the game, because I’m a coffee geek and used to roast my own beans back in graduate school – but you don’t need to love coffee to love this game. The bag building challenge stands on its own.
There’s no denying that there is some luck in the game, because you are drawing tokens randomly from a bag, but, where this game excels is that you have a lot of control over what goes in the bag and when you choose to stop roasting.
It achieves a great balance, where the game is unpredictable and challenging, but your decisions matter. That’s exactly what I’m looking for from a solo game.
My only hope with this one is for the BGG store to make upgraded bits (like the ones they have for Quacks of Quedlinburg). That would make it pretty much perfect for me.
We earn a commission if you make a
purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Marvel Champions
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games Players: 1-4 Time: 45-90 minutes
How To Play
IIn Marvel Champions you play as a hero from the Marvel universe – tons of characters ranging from Avengers, Web-warriors, and X-men – with a deck representing your skills and powers. It’s a cooperative game, so you play against one of many iconic marvel villains with a scenario deck, rather than an opponent, making this a perfect solo game (though it can be played as a multiplayer game as well). While Marvel Champions can be played as a multiplayer game, it also shines in solo play.
One of the best things about this game is that, while this is deck construction game with a huge card pool, you don’t have to engage with any of that to get started playing. Every hero comes with a pre-constructed deck, so you can just shuffle up and play.
The villain’s turn is easy to run, essentially just flipping cards and doing what they say. There are some scenarios that are more fiddly than others, for sure, but if you pick up the core box, it is so easy to get into this game and learn to play.
While this game is extremely approachable to new players, it has so much depth and possibility in the decks you can build and strategies you can explore. I have played this game over 1000 times, honestly, and I’m having a different experience every time. You can experiment with new heroes, new aspects, new combinations – every time you play.
Why You Should Be Playing This Game
Marvel Champions is my most played game of all time and a game that we review exhaustively on this site. If you really want to dig in on this game, check out our Marvel Champions Buyers Guide which will walk you through everything you need to know as a new player.
It is a living card game, so they are consistently releasing new content to keep the game fresh. It can be a little intimidating to jump in, since they’ve now been releasing content for this game consistently for years – but the game is completely modular. Other than the core set, which you’ll need to pick up first, there is nothing that you have to buy in any particular order.
Get the core box. Play that. Get hooked. Then, if you like the X-men, grab one of the X-men boxes to increase your villain pool. You like the Web Warriors? Pick up Sinister Motives. Whatever you like. Like a certain hero a lot? Pick up their hero pack, shuffle up, and start playing.
It can really be as simple as that, so if you know what heroes you are looking for, check out our comprehensive list of Marvel Champions expansions to see what is available.
One of thing that sets Marvel Champions apart is the ability to dial in the difficulty. Different scenarios are more challenging than others and there are cards that you can swap out or add in to the scenario deck that can adjust the difficulty to your liking. This game can be really tough if you want it to be and will really test your deck building ability, if you want it to be. It can also be a good but achievable challenge, with the precon decks. I love that I have the ability to choose.
Marvel Champions is a game that has truly captured my heart and kept me coming back for more. It deserves it’s place as one of the best solo board games and hope you love it as much as I do.
Spirit Island
Publisher: Greater Than Games Players: 1-4 Time: 45-90 minutes
How To Play
In Spirit Island, you take on the role of ancient spirits protecting your island, and the native people that inhabit it, from European colonizers. While not a traditional tile laying game, Spirit Island involves strategic placement and movement similar to that genre. As far as thematic games go, this provides such an amazing deep experience as you inhabit sprits like Lighting’s Swift Strike, Rampant Spread of Green, or Ocean’s Hungry Grasp.
Each spirit has a different play style, pace, and unique thematic mechanisms. Designer Eric Ruess has done such an amazing job of matching the mechanics to the spirit, that you hardly notice that you are engaging with an incredibly difficult, constantly evolving puzzle.
As a multiplayer game it is cooperative, so the spirits work together against the invaders, trying to clear them from the island, either by playing cards that do damage, moving them around, or generating fear. Your objective is to prevent them from building up settlements and cities and damaging the land, and, ultimately, to scare them off the island, so they pack up their ships and head back to where they came from.
Things can get out of hand quick, and depending on the difficulty level you play, this game can be incredibly challenging. Of course, it is equally satisfying, when you are able to protect your precious island.
Why You Should Be Playing This Game
This game, for me, is a perfect 10. Spirit Island is a unique game that combines deep strategy with a compelling theme. The theme is absolutely fantastic, and it’s so satisfying to harness the power of these incredible spirits, building them up over the course of the game to become unstoppable forces, exerting their influence over the island.
It is heavily strategic, but also quite tactical, since the board changes so dramatically each turn. In the base game, you can somewhat math things out (if you have the brain for that sort of thing, that is), but with the addition of some of the expansion mechanics, the math of the game disappears into the theme and you live instead in the story that unfolds, working desperately to address the chaos as it unfolds.
This game allows you to perfectly dial in the difficulty level by selecting an adversary (or not) and then selecting a difficulty level at which to play that adversary. Each adversary has different ways of scaling up their efforts and expanding across your island, and some even have different loss conditions, so you’ll need to explore different strategies when playing against them. Additionally each level of difficultly of an adversary introduces new challenges, either ongoing or with the initial setup, that increase the difficulty.
The top levels of difficulty can be incredibly difficult, but it’s not necessary to enjoy the game. The game is best when you dial in a difficulty level where you are facing a formidable challenge, but still experiencing the theme and not being steamrolled by invaders. That perfect level will vary for everyone, and will change over time. That’s why having a game with the ability to dial in difficulty with precision is so valuable.
There’s a lot to explore here, just in the base game, but there are also amazing expansions that add more thematic elements, more challenges, and more to explore. This is one that you can play casually once in a while, or make into a lifestyle game. There’s that much content to explore.
If you play solo, pick this one up. You won’t be sorry.
We earn a commission if you make a
purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Hostage Negotiator
Publisher: Van Ryder Games Players: 1 Time: 15-30 minutes
How To Play
This game is a bit tough to define. It’s a deck builder, a dice-chucking boss battler and a thematic campaign all in one. While you won’t be fighting monsters, the tension and stakes are just as high as you negotiate with abductors. You take on the role of a hostage negotiator and will use your skill and tactics to talk to the perpetrators and try to save the victims.
As the game progresses, the abductor will become more agitated and unpredictable and may start offing hostages, so yes, if you are looking for a lighthearted game with low stakes, this is not the one for you.
In response to the abductor’s unpredictable actions you will play cards which represent different tactics you might use to calm the down, stall, or send in support to retrieve some hostages. You’ll have to earn the trust of the abductor in order to gain value that can be spent on new and better cards between turns. The success of these actions is always determined by the chunky red dice. And, to be clear, in this game, things don’t always go your way. It can be pretty unforgiving.
Why You Should Play This Game
The base game, which includes everything you need to face off against a few abductors, is a great little game and a portable option that can be easily set up. The base game is great, but the expansions add more games and scenarios to keep things fresh and exciting. I wouldn’t call it infinitely replayable, but you’ll get some good mileage out of it.
That in and of itself would not make my list of the best solo board games. What I’m recommending, is the career expansion which takes a little dice game and blasts it into the stratosphere.
It adds a campaign and a large scale narrative element with juicy decisions about how you will define each year of your career and deal with the stress of the job and the stress that life can throw at you. These decisions that you make will ultimately impact play from session to session.
It means that you aren’t just facing off against the game, but you are building a character and a life as the stress and intensity of the job weighs on you. The addition of a narrative element and a sense of progression immerses players in a thrilling and intense experience.
When you play a one-off game of Hostage Negotiator, you might find yourself getting upset with the dice not going your way, you might be excited that you only lost a couple hostages as you eek out the win.
But this isn’t mechanical. When the dice don’t go your way, it’s part of the story. And when you lose hostages, it counts toward your total over the course of your career, so each life actually feels precious, rather than a mechanism in a game.
I don’t want to spoil anything for you. There are some amazing surprises as you play though this box, and it is absolutely something that ever solo board gamer should try to experience. you will not regret it. Unforgettable.
All that said, it is not super easy to get together everything you need to play the career expansion. You will need ALL of the following in order to play career mode:
- Base Game
- Crime Wave (which is also a fully playable base game, but with different abductors and negotiator cards)
- Career Expansion
- Abductor Packs (NOTE: you need a minimum of seven for career mode.)
Here’s what I’d do: pick up a base box – either base game or Crime Wave – and play through the initial abductors, get a feel for the game. If you like it – at all – then do what I did and go all in. I found an all in Kickstarter on eBay for less than it cost to buy everything individually, but however you do it, pick up everything and play the game as it was meant to be played – Career. You won’t be disappointed.
Also Read: THE Best Board Game Organizer: Gamegenic Lair 600+
Conclusion: Check out our best picks for solo play
Whether you’re a rookie venturing into the solo gaming for the first time, or an experienced strategist shopping around for your next challenge, if you’re just looking for an engaging way to kill a couple minutes and wind down, there’s something for you here. These games are designed to be played solo, offering a wide range of experiences from quick puzzles to deep strategic challenges.
Any of these games would make a fantastic addition to any solo players collection or as your first foray into all solo gaming has to offer. So pick one up today and start playing.
<- Back to Board Games by Player Count
Board Games for Two Players ->