The hardest mechanic of any tabletop game is finding people to play it with. The logistical difficulties of organizing a group, the influx of high-quality indie TTRPGs, and countless other factors have given rise to a renaissance of sorts for solo tabletop role-playing games — specifically, solo rules for games that would otherwise be for a full group.
To be clear, the solo tabletop phenomenon is not new. As Polygon contributor Tom Ana explains, it started in earnest with wargames in the ’80s, slowly growing in prominence for the next few decades until the quarantine period of the ongoing COVID pandemic offered a perfect moment for board games and TTRPGs. Standalone TTRPGs like Tim Hutchings’ historical Thousand Year Old Vampire, Shawn Tompkin’s Ironsworn, Chris Bisette’s The Wretched, and Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada laid the groundwork for solitary tabletop RPG experiences.
In the five years since 2020, the demand has only grown. At PAX Unplugged last month, I heard a repeated refrain: people came looking for solo role-playing games. While so many great games have debuted in the last few years, tabletop gamers seem to have maxed out their shelves with games they may never find a group to play. To work with this, designers have begun incorporating solo play into their rules sets — either by making a secondary supplement, making solo rules a stretch goal during their crowdfunding campaigns, or including them in the base game itself. The three games below represent the range of approaches designers have taken to including solo rules in their games.
Swedish games studio Free League Publishing made solo rules for its Nordic Horror RPG Vaesen in 2023. Written by Per Holmström, the solo iteration of the game contains a step-by-step guide that shifts the base game’s pre-determined mystery to one you discover as you go. Using a deck of cards and the core book’s random tables, solo Vaesen has players uncover the mystery through rolling dice to determine their discoveries while using the color and value of the cards to determine the outcome of their actions.
Based on the classic hook and ring game, HUNT(er/ed) by Meghan Cross and Dillin Apelyan has two players take opposing roles of hunter and monster. Players roll 2d6 each, competing to see who can roll doubles first to advance their token across the board. The winner then pulls a card with a corresponding prompt, pushing the story forward in the same tradition as games like For The Queen. The solo iteration of the game takes HUNTER(er/ed)’s core experience of examining monstrosity and pushes the player to move along a scale of acceptance or denial. A stretch goal for HUNT(er/ed)’s crowdfunding campaign, the solo rule set was written by Elliot Davis who has written his own solo game, Project Ecco, as well as solo editions of Soul Muppet’s Orbital Blues and Paint the Town Red.
A surreal play-to-lose horror game inspired by Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, The Zone leaned fully into solo play from the jump. In a similar way to HUNT(er/ed), this game relies on card-based prompts to guide players through a quarantined, mutation-filled zone from which only one of them will make it out alive. Each action requires drawing a “Not-So-Easy” card, that has a “yes, and” or “no, but” result. Advertised as a game for 1-6 people (rather than 2-6 with a GM), solo rules were always baked into The Zone. The solo rules stay largely the same, except the sole player controls multiple characters.
