Solo board gaming has become a genuinely big part of the hobby, entire game lines designed around a single-player automa, whole online communities built around it, and I understand the appeal in the abstract, the idea that you can get the puzzle-solving satisfaction of a good game without needing to wrangle three other people’s schedules. I’ve tried, multiple times, with games specifically well regarded for their solo modes, and I keep bouncing off it, and I’ve finally worked out why, which is less about the games themselves and more about what I actually want from the hobby.

For me the appeal was never really the puzzle. It’s Ines calculating a trade for a full silent minute while the rest of us wait, half annoyed and half impressed. It’s Marcus forgetting scoring for the fourth time on a game we’ve played a dozen times, which should be maddening and is somehow one of my favorite recurring bits of our Thursday nights. It’s the specific texture of a table full of people who know each other well enough to read a bluff off a facial expression, which no automa deck is ever going to replicate no matter how cleverly it’s designed.

I tried a solo campaign of a game I genuinely love in its multiplayer form, alone, over about two weeks, and I finished it, and I remember almost nothing specific about the experience. No arguments about a rules interpretation, no moment where someone made a move that changed how the whole table saw the game, none of the texture that actually sticks with me from a normal Thursday. It felt like reading a plot summary of a book instead of reading the book, technically complete, structurally absent.

I want to be careful here because I don’t think solo gaming is lesser, exactly, for people who genuinely want that experience, quiet, self-paced, no scheduling required. Some of my most game-literate friends prefer it and I don’t think they’re missing something I’m not. I think I’ve just figured out that the social friction, the actual unpredictable presence of other people making choices I didn’t see coming, is not a cost I’m tolerating in exchange for the mechanics. It’s the entire reason I’m at the table in the first place.

So I keep buying games with genuinely excellent solo modes, and I keep not using them, and I’ve stopped feeling guilty about the games sitting there unplayed solo the way the box promises they could be. They’re getting used exactly the way I actually want to use them, on a Thursday, with people who occasionally forget how scoring works.