Solo Board Games

The Short version – TL;DR

One player, one challenge. Solo board games have moved from a niche consideration to a genuine design priority over the past decade. Some are built entirely for solo play: Friday, Under Falling Skies, and Arkham Horror: The Card Game all function best with one person at the table. Others include a solo mode alongside their multiplayer rules – Wingspan, Ark Nova, and Spirit Island all have well-regarded solo variants. The pandemic years accelerated demand, and publishers responded. Solo games rely on automa systems, app opponents, or pure puzzle formats to generate challenge without another human. The result is a category with a devoted audience among players who want the full tabletop experience without coordinating a group. Gateway solo picks: Friday and Under Falling Skies. Mid-weight: Wingspan (solo mode) and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. Experienced solo players: Spirit Island, Mage Knight, and Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Recent release worth knowing: Primal: The Awakening (2024) for experienced solo players who want a boss-battle campaign.

There is a specific pleasure in playing a board game alone that people who have not tried it sometimes find hard to believe. Not the resignation of playing alone because nobody was available – the genuine, deliberate choice to sit down with a game, set it up properly, and spend two hours in a puzzle that requires your full attention. No table talk, no waiting for others to make decisions, no negotiating game choice or start time. Just you, the game, and whatever problem it is presenting this session.

Solo gaming has grown substantially as a recognised part of the hobby. A decade ago it was a footnote. Now major publishers design solo modes as standard, dedicated solo games reach the hobby’s highest ratings, and there are entire communities, podcasts, and channels devoted to the format. Friday is in countless collections. Spirit Island gets played solo far more often than most people admit. Arkham Horror: The Card Game has built an entire devoted audience who primarily play it alone.

Below I cover what solo gaming actually means as a category, the important distinction between dedicated solo games and games with solo modes, why the format works, who it suits, and what to play at every level.

What Solo Games Actually Means

A solo game is one where a single player engages with the game as a meaningful, complete experience. This covers two distinct products that deserve clear separation: games designed from the ground up for solo play, and games designed primarily for multiplayer that include a solo mode as an additional option.

Both are legitimate. But they are different things with different qualities, different design challenges, and different experiences at the table. A game built specifically for solo play is optimised around one player’s decision space, pacing, and narrative arc. A multiplayer game with a solo mode added is optimised around its primary player count and then adapted. Sometimes that adaptation is excellent. Often it is merely functional. Occasionally it is an afterthought.

BoardGameGeek lists Solo / Solitaire Game as a mechanic category, applied to both dedicated solo games and games with solo modes. When choosing a game specifically for solo play, this distinction matters. If the box says “1-4 players” and the solo mode is tucked at the back of the rulebook, manage expectations accordingly. If the box says “1-2 players” or is designed by someone with a track record in solo design, the experience is likely more thoughtfully constructed.

Dedicated Solo Games vs Solo Modes: The Key Distinction

Dedicated solo games are built for one player. All the design energy went into the single-player experience. Friday (2011, Friedemann Friese) has no multiplayer mode – it never needed one. Under Falling Skies (2020, Tomas Uhlir) is a solo dice-placement game about repelling an alien invasion. Final Girl (2021, Evan Derrick) is a horror solo game series about surviving slasher scenarios. Arkham Horror: The Card Game functions best solo, with many players who own it never playing it any other way. These games are the purer recommendation for someone who wants a solo experience. The design was made for them.

Games with solo modes are multiplayer games that include a solo option. Wingspan (1-5 players, solo mode included), Ark Nova (1-4 players, competitive solo AI included), Spirit Island (1-4 players, fully soloable), and Gloomhaven (1-4 players, widely played solo) all belong here. The quality of these solo modes varies enormously. Wingspan’s solo mode is an automa – an automated competitor that scores against you – that works well but is fundamentally different from the game at two or more. Spirit Island plays excellently solo because you control multiple spirits and the game’s cooperative nature translates cleanly to single-player. Ark Nova’s competitive AI is well regarded. Gloomhaven was designed with a detailed solo mode from the start.

Neither category is superior. They serve different needs. A player who specifically wants to be alone with a game on Tuesday evenings and owns enough games already is probably better served by a dedicated solo game. A player who buys games primarily for group play but wants to be able to play them alone when nobody is around should look at the quality of the solo modes in their existing collection or at new purchases.

For this guide I cover both, and I flag clearly which is which throughout.

A Short History of Solo Gaming

Solo gaming in some form has existed as long as patience card games and solitaire. The specific hobby context emerged from wargaming. Many early wargamers in the 1960s and 1970s played against themselves – one player running both sides of a historical simulation. Publications like Ambush! (1983) and RAF (1986) were designed specifically for solo play.

In the modern hobby, solo modes appeared in cooperative games almost by default: if all players work together against the game, one player can do the same. Pandemic and Arkham Horror both played solo, even if the publishers initially saw multiplayer as the primary mode.

Friday (2011, Friedemann Friese, Rio Grande Games) is often cited as the game that crystallised the dedicated solo design format for modern hobby gaming. It is a deck-building game where you are Robinson Crusoe’s assistant, helping him survive long enough to escape an island. It has never been anything other than a solo game, and it earned broad critical respect that helped establish solo design as a legitimate speciality.

The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 produced a measurable spike in solo gaming interest and a corresponding increase in dedicated solo designs. Under Falling Skies (2020, Czech Games Edition) won the Origins Award for Best Card Game – a remarkable result for a dedicated solo title. Publishers who had previously viewed solo modes as optional additions began investing in them seriously.

By 2022 and 2023, the growth of the category was reflected in BGG rankings: Spirit Island, Gloomhaven, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and Arkham Horror (3rd edition) all sat comfortably in the top hundred overall, and all have substantial solo communities.

Why Solo Gaming Works

No coordination overhead

Getting four people to agree on a game, a time, and a venue is a non-trivial organisational challenge. Solo gaming eliminates all of it. You play when you want to play, for as long as you want to play. You can pause mid-session and continue tomorrow. You never have to adjust game choice to match player experience levels or group preferences. For players with demanding schedules or unreliable gaming groups, this is not a minor convenience. It is often the difference between playing games regularly and not playing them at all.

Full attention on the puzzle

In a multiplayer game, most of your session is spent waiting for other players to take their turns. In a solo game, all of that time is your decision time. The pace is entirely your own. Complex games that feel slow at a group because of extended deliberation between turns flow naturally at one player, because there is no waiting. This is one reason why heavy games – Mage Knight, Spirit Island, Arkham Horror: The Card Game – often have particularly strong solo reputations: the weight of decision-making is pleasant rather than arduous when you are not watching others wait.

The game meets you where you are

Solo games do not require you to manage social dynamics, teach rules, or adapt to the mood and pace of a group. If you want to be challenged, you choose the difficulty. If you want a session to run ninety minutes, you pick the right game. If you want to play the same game three times in a row to crack its logic, nobody is stopping you. That responsiveness to individual preference is something group games cannot fully match.

High scores, campaigns, and personal bests

Solo gaming develops its own metrics of progression. The game remembers how you did last time. Campaigns in Arkham Horror and Gloomhaven carry consequences between sessions. Under Falling Skies tracks your performance across a campaign of linked missions. Friday improves as you learn the deck structure and develop better clearing strategies. This relationship with personal progression – am I getting better? – is something that group games rarely deliver as cleanly.

Who Are These Games For?

Solo games are for people who want to play games on their own terms, on their own schedule. That sounds obvious, but it covers a wide range of situations and player types.

They suit: players whose regular gaming group is hard to coordinate; players who travel or spend time alone and want a portable engaging activity; players who want to experience a complex game at their own pace without the pressure of a group waiting on decisions; players who find the social dynamics of competitive games stressful; and players who simply enjoy games as a solitary meditative activity alongside other solo hobbies.

They are less suited to players who specifically enjoy board games for their social dimension – the conversation, the negotiation, the shared experience of a competitive or cooperative session. Solo gaming is genuinely a different experience from group gaming. Some players try it and find it satisfying. Others find the absence of the social layer leaves the game feeling incomplete. Neither reaction is wrong.

They work at every experience level. Friday is genuinely accessible to players new to the hobby who have no gaming partner available. Mage Knight is one of the most demanding solo experiences in the hobby and requires significant time investment to appreciate. The category spans that entire range.

The Different Forms Solo Gaming Takes

Dedicated solo only: Games with no multiplayer mode. Friday, Under Falling Skies, Final Girl, and Onirim. The design brief was one player from the start, which tends to produce tighter, more focused experiences.

Cooperative with natural solo play: Games where one player controls multiple characters or spirits, running the full cooperative game alone. Spirit Island, Robinson Crusoe, and Gloomhaven all work this way. The “solitaire” experience is actually full multiplayer played by one person handling all the roles.

Automa systems: Multiplayer games where an automated opponent – the automa – follows a scripted decision tree that simulates competitive player behaviour without another human. Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, Scythe, and Viticulture use automa systems of varying quality. The automa does not play optimally or intelligently – it generates a score and creates a competitive target.

Competitive AI / app opponents: Games where an app drives an opponent’s decisions, usually with adjustable difficulty. Descent: Legends of the Dark uses an app to run dungeon scenarios. Some living card games use digital opponents for solo play.

Pure puzzle solo: Games designed as a single-player puzzle with a high-score format. Under Falling Skies, Onirim, and many print-and-play designs work this way. You are not competing against an automa – you are solving the game’s puzzle and measuring your performance.

Living card games solo: The Fantasy Flight living card game format (Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Marvel Champions) supports solo play natively, with dedicated solo rules and a campaign structure that tells a narrative over many sessions.

Games Worth Playing

Gateway solo – the entry tier

Friday (2011, Friedemann Friese, Rio Grande Games): Friday is the dedicated solo game I recommend first to players new to the format. You are helping Robinson Crusoe survive an island by running hazard challenges that improve his skills. The deck-building mechanic rewards learning the card interactions. The difficulty increases as the game progresses and scales well: hard enough to feel genuine, not so punishing that it discourages new solo players. It plays in thirty to forty-five minutes and travels in a small box. Also crosses into: Deck Building, Card Games.

Under Falling Skies (2020, Tomas Uhlir, Czech Games Edition): Under Falling Skies is a dedicated solo dice-placement game about defending Earth from alien invasion – it is about as close to a tabletop Space Invaders as the hobby has produced. Alien ships descend across a grid above your underground city. Each die you place activates a room in your base but also advances the enemy ship in that column. Every placement is a painful trade-off: do you shoot down the closest ship, research a new technology, or produce energy for your base? It plays in under an hour, scales across a campaign of linked missions, and produces the kind of agonising individual decisions per turn that many much longer games fail to match. Also crosses into: Dice Games, Puzzle Games.

Mid-weight solo

Wingspan – solo mode (2019, Elizabeth Hargrave, Stonemaier Games): Wingspan includes an automa called Automa that plays a simulated competing birdwatcher, scoring based on a separate deck of cards. The solo mode works cleanly and plays in about forty-five minutes alone – noticeably faster than a multiplayer session. Whether you find the automa genuinely engaging or just a competitive target depends partly on temperament; some solo players love it, others find the lack of real adaptation makes it feel more like a score-to-beat than an opponent. Worth trying if you already own Wingspan, and the game is one of my most-played solo titles. Also crosses into: Engine Building, Resource Management, Family Games.

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion (2020, Isaac Childres, Cephalofair Games): Jaws of the Lion is the most accessible entry into the Gloomhaven universe for solo play. The card-driven dungeon crawl runs cleanly with two characters handled by one player, and the twenty-five-scenario campaign provides genuine narrative progression. The cooperative design translates well to solo because you are solving the tactical puzzle of the scenario rather than competing. If you enjoy the experience, the full Gloomhaven game awaits on the other end of this. Also crosses into: Dungeon Crawl, Cooperative Games, Campaign Games.

Cascadia – solo mode (2021, Randy Flynn, AEG / Flatout Games – Spiel des Jahres 2022): Cascadia’s solo mode is one of the better examples of a tile-placement game with a clean competitive target. You play against a score target using a simplified system. The puzzle of building your habitat efficiently still fully applies, and the solo mode plays in around twenty minutes, making it an excellent quick solo session option. Also crosses into: Tile Placement, Family Games.

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Recent releases (2024 and 2025)

Primal: The Awakening – solo mode (2024, Reggie Games): Primal: The Awakening is a cooperative boss-battle miniatures game that received strong reviews on its 2024 release and includes a fully functional solo mode. Players are hunters pursuing large monster miniatures across card-driven combat. The solo experience preserves the full depth of the card interactions and monster behaviour systems. For experienced solo players who want something in the miniatures-adjacent boss-battle space, it is one of the most ambitious and positively reviewed cooperative solo experiences from 2024. Cost and table space are significant, but the design quality justifies both for the right player. Also crosses into: Cooperative Games, Miniatures Games, Campaign Games.

Experienced solo players

Spirit Island (2017, R. Eric Reuss, Greater Than Games): Spirit Island is, in my experience, the highest-quality solo experience currently in the hobby for players who want genuine strategic depth. Players are spirits defending an island from colonisers, each with distinct powers and play styles. Solo play involves controlling one or two spirits simultaneously, and the design scales cleanly to this format. The difficulty is adjustable through adversary selection – playing against Britain or France is meaningfully different from the base difficulty. The game’s card management, power progression, and island-reading skills take many sessions to develop, and the development feels genuine. I have played probably sixty solo sessions of Spirit Island and it still presents new problems. Also crosses into: Cooperative Games, Area Control.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016, Nate French and Matthew Newman, Fantasy Flight Games): Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a living card game set in the Lovecraft mythos where investigators build personalised decks and play through narrative campaigns of linked scenarios. The solo experience is arguably better than the multiplayer experience: the information management and the narrative stakes feel more personal with one player. Each campaign is a series of connected scenarios where your choices carry permanent consequences. The base box contains two campaigns; expansions extend it significantly. The ongoing cost of the living card game format is the main caveat. Also crosses into: Deck Building, Card Games, Campaign Games.

Mage Knight: Ultimate Edition (2011, Vlaada Chvatil, WizKids): Mage Knight is the hardest recommendation to make for solo play because it demands more commitment than almost any other game to return value. The rules are substantial, the setup is involved, and the decisions are numerous enough that the first several plays are purely about understanding the system. But once the system is understood, Mage Knight produces solo sessions of genuine depth and memorable storytelling that very few games match. Your mage knight travels across a modular landscape, defeating monsters, conquering cities, building their deck, and managing a complex hand of multi-use cards. The solo mode is fully supported and explicitly one of the intended primary ways to play. Also crosses into: Deck Building, Area Control, Campaign Games.

Arkham Horror (3rd Edition) (2018, Fantasy Flight Games): For players who want the Arkham atmosphere without the ongoing living card game investment, the third edition of the board game plays cleanly as a solo experience. One player runs two investigators through scenario-based Lovecraftian investigations across a modular Arkham board. The mechanical overhead is lower than the card game, and the self-contained box means no ongoing purchases are required. Also crosses into: Cooperative Games, Dungeon Crawl.

Common Mistakes

Buying a multiplayer game primarily for its solo mode. The solo mode in a multiplayer game is almost never the reason the game is well-reviewed. If a solo mode is what you need, a dedicated solo game or a multiplayer game with a particularly strong solo reputation will serve you better than a game whose solo mode is an afterthought. Check reviews specifically for solo play before buying something for that purpose.

Starting with a game that is too heavy. The appeal of solo gaming is partly that you can take your time with complex games. The mistake is trying to learn Mage Knight or Arkham Horror: The Card Game cold, from the rulebook, on your first solo session. Start with Friday or Under Falling Skies. Learn what a well-designed solo puzzle feels like. Graduate upward from there.

Playing only with the minimum difficulty. Most solo games have adjustable difficulty. Playing repeatedly at the easiest setting feels comfortable but does not develop your understanding of what the game is actually testing. Once you understand the rules, push the difficulty. That is where the satisfying solo experience lives.

Expecting the same experience as group play. Solo gaming is not a substitute for group gaming. It is its own activity with different qualities. If you come to it expecting the same social energy as a group session, you will be disappointed. If you come to it expecting a puzzle that meets you exactly where you are, you will find it.

Not using the solo community. There is an active and generous global solo gaming community on BoardGameGeek’s solo gaming forum, in numerous podcasts, and across social media. Solo gamers are enthusiastic advocates for the format and extremely willing to share recommendations. If you are unsure what to play next, ask them.

Is Solo Gaming for You?

Solo gaming works for almost any player who sometimes has time to play and nobody to play with – which describes most people in the hobby at various points. The entry level is accessible: Friday and Under Falling Skies both play within an hour and teach in under fifteen minutes. The ceiling is as deep as you want, from those quick solo puzzles through to the forty-hour Gloomhaven campaign or the years-long Arkham Horror: The Card Game collection.

It is genuinely a different activity from group gaming rather than a lesser version of it. Some players find it equally satisfying. Others find it a useful stopgap. A few find it preferable. All three reactions are valid.

If you are looking for a starting point: Friday if you want something specifically designed for solo play, Wingspan solo if you already own Wingspan and want to explore it alone, Spirit Island if you are ready to invest in one of the best strategic puzzle experiences the hobby offers, and Arkham Horror: The Card Game if you want narrative depth across a long-form solo campaign.