Oh yes, I’m not afraid to admit it.  I like to play with myself from time to time.  That’s to say I play BOARD GAMES by myself.  What were you thinking?

A few years back, Pixar Films released a short subject called “Geri’s Game”.  You can find it bundled on the DVD for A Bug’s Life.  In this film, we see an old man setting up chess pieces and then playing a game against himself.  After each move, he gets up, walks around to the other side of the table, and stares at the damage caused by his last move.  The film is funny because it captures this man’s mental engagement in a despereate battle against his own “other half”.  Paerhaps the old man is lonely, and perhaps this is a hobby that he has cultivated for many years.  In any case, it’s a short subject that, in classic Pixar style, is both touching and endearing.

It might seem obvious, in this day and age, that there are plenty of ways to play games against “real people” by way of the Internet.  This, too, has its pros and cons.  Sometimes, it is a hassle to find online opponents for a particular game.  Try going on BrettSpielWelt (see Rhelik’s post) and see how long it takes you to find a group of English speaking opponents for one of the less popular games there.  You also have to deal with the fact that online opponents are sometimes immature louts.  Sometimes they are cheating (two players collaborating, for example), and sometimes they are just way better than you are.

I have to confess that I have been playing multi-player board games against myself for years.  Now, I was the youngest child in my family by quite a few years, and as I got older I was in many ways an “only child.”  My friends weren’t always close by, and it may just be a sad fact of my own personal circumstances that I had to play games by myself (or against myself) in order to keep my brain challenged.  This was all well before the internet, although I did have my trusty Atari 2600 and later my Commodore 64.  So, yes, computer games did fill part of the void, but I never had cable television while growing up, so there were times when there was just nothing better to do.

I have fond memories of times when I was a lonely, nerdy, teenager, sitting in my parent’s basement on a Friday night, conducting large 6–way Car Wars battles.  During my summer breaks from college, I would drop down into the basement and set up a large Battletech skirmish with 4 mechs (or more) on a side.  Even now, when I am stuck home alone, I sometimes reach for one of my newer Euro-type board games to give myself a bit of a mental holiday.

One of the great advantages of playing a game against yourself is that you know you are going into a game where you are evenly matched.  You are also treading into your own mental space.  The experience is solely one between you and the game, with no outside distractions.  There is no embarassment if you lose, although there is no glory whatsoever when the game is over and one hypothetical “you” manages to win.  The enjoyment is a little more subtle than that.

Certain kinds of games are, of course, going to work much better if you want to have a compelling “multi-solitaire” experience.  You want games where the long term strategy might be somewhat minimized, and also you want games where there is very little value placed on “hidden” information.  You want to be able to analyze each turn as its own discrete entity, one discrete moment in time, where you can work out the “best move” for that player position at that moment in the game.

Chess, of course, has no hidden information whatsoever.  There is, of course, some long term strategy.  There’s not much point in setting up a sequence of moves to try and create a trap for your other self, since it is hard to forget about that possible trap when you are looking at moves from the other side of the board.  Still, one can easily imagine a grand master sitting at home trying out interactions between certain kinds of openings.  One can imagine a master playing through a series of moves from a newspaper article about a tournament game, and then taking over at some point to see how the game might have turned out differently.  Alas, I am no great chess player, and I don’t much care to get lost in that particular bit of abstraction.

Abstract games, though, do tend to work pretty well as “semi-solitaire” games.  A game like Blokus works pretty well, as does something like DVONN or Zertz.  Something like Ingenious does depend on hidden information, though.  Unless you play with everyone’s hand face up normally (not a recommended variant) you aren’t really playing the game in the way that it is meant to be played.

A luck-based war game has a good chance of working well.  Something like the D&D minis skirmish game has in recent years often been my game of choice for that rainy day at home.  A private skirmish gives you a chance to try out new warband designs to see what synergy might exist between certain combinations of pieces.  Sure, “real” players make some strategic decisions about deployment and movement strategies.  Still, it is possible to look at each player’s position on each and every turn to try and figure out the best available move based on what the board looks like at that moment.  In the end, a game of D&D minis comes down to who can make the right rolls on a d20 during those critical rounds when the outcome of the battle hangs in the balance.  I don’t deny that the game is much MORE fun when you can roll that timely “20” and thereby secure your victory against someone ELSE’S warband.  Still, it does pass the time on that rainy day.

One drawback to playing something like a minis game by yourself is that you end up with no one else to share in the bookkeeping or in the setup and cleanup.  You have to track the hit points and spell usage for both sides in the combat.  This does get tiring after a while, and this is no doubt a big reason why I don’t do more “test runs” or “solitaire tournaments” at home with my D&D minis.

Games with auctions or complex negotiations are pretty terrible in terms of their solitaire suitability.  I wouldn’t play RA by myself, and I wouldn’t play Traders of Genoa without other people at the table.  Puerto Rico is something that you could play by yourself, although the bookkeeping for three or four players would be quite a chore.

Magic: the Gathering has some suitability in that you may feel the need to try out new deck designs against yourself.  However, you really lose the “A-ha” moment that comes when you play a timely counterspell against the other guy’s big creature.  Other games with “surprise” moments, such as Stratego or Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation are very low in terms of suitability for solo play.

I think there’s nothing “weird” or unsavory about buying a new board game, taking it home, reading the rules, setting it up, and giving it a “dry run” as a three or four player game.  At this stage, you are just trying to work out the flow of the game, and to figure out a few basic strategies.  Sometimes that means setting up “hands” of hidden cards as face up stacks next to each player position on the table, and just trying to take things one player at a time.  Still, it’s a big advantage when you can show up to teach a new game at your weekly gaming group and you are able to say, “Hold on to those resource X cards – you will see how valuable they are as the game goes on.”  In other words, because you are able to do a much better job teaching the game, first time players will end up having more fun, and they will be more likely to ask to see that game again (making your decision to buy  the game all the more worthwhile).  I freely confess that I tried a dry run of my recent Thurn and Taxis purchase (see that article here) before showing it off to my local game group (though I still ended up losing that first game against live players). 

Comments are welcome.  I would love to hear from other lonely voices, out in the void, who want to join with me in saying that there is absolutely no shame in playing with yourself every once in a while.