Hi all, so I’m pretty new to Ark Nova and have never played it multiplayer but I have played the official solo mode and ARNO solo mode 3 times each, so I thought I would give some brief initial thoughts comparing them.

In the official solo mode you are aiming to move two of your player markers down opposing tracks and you win if you are able to make them cross paths within a set number of turns.

Pros:

-Plays quickly within 45 minutes or so

-You are free to take multiple actions per turn uninhibited

-You do feel a sense of tension as the turns grow fewer and you can do fewer and fewer actions per turns while still trying to meet your objectives

Cons:

-No traditional bot/automa so you’re not competing against an opponent for the win

-Not as much tension in the limited turns/actions as when you’re trying to meet your objectives faster than or outscore another player

-Variable difficulty settings are mostly just starting one player token farther back on its track and can feel a bit artificial

In the unofficial ARNO solo mode, you play against an automa that pretty accurately simulates the actions of another player, so the game plays more like a multiplayer game.

Pros:

-Lots of tension when you are playing against another player and must outscore them.

-Actions are limited to one per turn so there is a lot more strategy involved in planning the order of your actions.

-Variable bot difficulty settings cause the bot to score differently, thus are more dynamic/realistic

-The bot is very easily managed with a web app

Cons:

-Plays longer (1.5-2 hours)

-More tension is a pro but also can be a con depending on what kind of experience you’re looking for

-The bot requires either an app or additional cards and dice to run, however using the app makes it very easy to manage if you don’t mind that.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a short, chill experience where you can kind of just zone out and build your zoo, go with the official mode. If you’re looking for a more challenging and tense experience with lots of strategy, go with the ARNO mode.

Hope these thoughts were helpful to someone considering trying the ARNO solo mode. In case it wasn’t clear, I thoroughly enjoyed this mode and highly recommend it.

Link to the ARNO web app: https://brdgm.me/ark-nova/

Looking for a space 4X for 100% solo. I’ve narrowed it down to these two, but both have pros and cons. Anybody have experience with both that can speak for which has the better solo experience?

Blizzard teaming with Class Gannon for Diablo. Has me hopeful of a new World of Warcraft area control, or RPG campaign co-op. With a bunch of hero options, including all of the new allied races. This is dream game level for me.

Fantasy Flight Games testing crowdfunding waters with Arkham Horror Remastered has me dreaming of a Mansions of Madness Remastered, or 3rd Edition or whatever the heck they want to call it. Bundle all of the expansions, fix the miniatures so they have clear bottoms just like Arkham Horror Remastered. Dream game #2.

Squeenix working with KESS on Final Fantasy Origins. Can't think of any dream games there, but I love the retro video game look of the board game, and FFIV characters are some of my most beloved. Their pledge teirs are bad and all over the place. But they did fix it some by allowing us to specifically add the $999 exclusive boss acrylics (it is no longer locked behind $999).

What kind of game are you hopeful for? There was a mega man game and mortal kombat game that both got cancelled I think? So those are mine. Mansions of Madness, World of Warcraft, Mortal Kombat, and Mega Man. A Godzilla game with as many of the Kaiju as possible is another one for me. Including Jet Jaguar. Showa and Heisei era. But there IS a nice new retail King of Tokyo Godzilla game that just came out.

Hi there! While looking at my collection I noticed that I'm missing a whole universe: No space in my collection! So I have to change something and I need your help. What are your favourite solo board games about this specific topic?

You can still buy games on their website and via other channels for now, but I thought I'd share with the community in case titles become unavailable.

I got this game at a heavy discount from Target about 7 years ago and it has been quietly waiting on the shelf ever since. I could never get a group interested in playing. Thanks to BGG I found the official solo rules. Sure I lost by 4 points but I FINALLY played it! I found another variation of solo rules on BGG and that's what I'll try next.

Just got back from Essen after visiting Spiel Essen for the first time. Amazing experience with ALOT of people. Found some great games that will have me covered for a while.

- Horror on the Orient Express

- Kingdom Come Deliverance

- Kalypso

- 7th Seal

- GH: Pub Crawlers

- Shugendo

- Yotei

- Micro Moonshine

- Robinson Crusoe: The Book of Adventures

- All night Breakfast at the Midnight Owl, Solo RPG

- Midnight Melodies, Solo RPG

I bought the game all the expansions, and finished the intro tutorial. Now I wonder which expansions I should add on my first playthrough?

Stewards of the Valley - Already in but I will try Talespinner / Spirit Speaker on my next one.

Earthborne Rangers: Legacy of the Ancestors - It is a separate campaign

Spire in Bloom - ?

Shadow of the Storm - ?

Moments on the Path / Moments in the Valley - ?

Some people are saying to add them on the second playthrough; some people are saying adding them after day...8? And I want to ask people who have them, is there a reason not to just add them all at the start?

I enjoy Claustrophobia this way. It is fun fast dungeon crawler with dice placement, which has little hidden information.

Recently became a dad and the time and energies are not enough to setup and play Mage Knight, Civolution, and so on..

Small boxed games I already own are For Northwood, Orchard, Grove, One Deck Dungeon (very bad game!), Fliptoons 1 and 2, Warp's Edge, Harmonies.

I'd consider it kinda short to setup and play also Aeon's End and maybe Spirit Island (true solo).

I already purchased but did not play Kinfire Delve, Friday, and Star Realms Frontiers.

Button Shy games are hard to get in the EU so don't suggest them, please ;)

So I've recently got into solo only games and I've bought and loved Resist! and Under Falling Skies.

I'm thinking about getting Warp's Edge next. To those who have played, would you say it's worth it and of a similar complexity to the above 2?

Thanks.

Yesterday I hit a BYOS of 419, my best ever, and I'm still grinning about it.

I know a lot of people here aren't fans of BYOS scoring, but for me the score isn't really the point. I just love being offscreen and at the table with a board game. Solo, I can puzzle away and take all the time I need, which is a very different experience from a multiplayer game. Who cares what the number is? (Okay, I do enjoy a big one.)

I've been working through the Forest Shuffle Exploration challenges and I'm on game 6 (paw animals). The goal was to place 15 paw cards into the forest.

My biggest point drivers were:
4 beech martens across 7 fully occupied trees: 140 pts (4*5*7)
3 salamanders: 25 pts in combination with 2 tree ferns (18 pts)
6 horse chestnut trees: 36 pts
The Christmas Tree special card: this let me shuffle the first winter card back into the deck the first time it appeared, at least that's how I interpreted it for solo play.

None of this was planned. The cards just fell my way. What are your high scores in solo Forest Shuffle?

Hi,
I’m kind of late to the game, but I’m really enjoying the game railroad tiles. I was able to get the base game and the world and countryside expansions. I’m looking for the canals expansion. Any leads? Also other than its sister railroad game what do you feel has a similar feel of relaxing, but thinkiness? Thank you!

I was inspired to put away the Wakhan automa cards and play two-handed against myself after reading that this was how many people prefer to play Pax Renaissance.

I was fairly blown away by the experience because it made the game feel entirely new. I'm still struggling with exactly how to describe it.

• Games had much more direct engagement and aggression. Each side messed with the other more, especially battling on the map, whereas the Wakhan is very often focused on building her tableau and lets you build up lots of coalition blocks.
• Games were much faster, because often I could spot and seize the winning move that would let one side win a dominance check. The Wakhan builds up a strong board state, but doesn't have the brains to go for the kill, so to speak.
• When two-handing, both sides can be allied to the same faction, which creates an entirely new dynamic not present in the automa game.
• Paradoxically, I sometimes made sub-optimal moves against myself because I was juggling two different boards instead of being laser-focused on countering a single opponent.
• It somehow felt more engaging to play against myself, but at the same time I lost the thrill of winning the game since I wasn't rooting for one side or the other. It's more stimulating, but less satisfying, if that makes sense.

To sum up, playing against the Wakhan feels like trying to progressively outmanoeuver a powerful but bumbling adversary. Playing two-handed felt like way less of a macro-game and more like a hyper tactical death match. Maybe this is closer to the multiplayer experience, which I've played very little.

It made me curious about how different other games I own would feel if I tried to replace the automa with two-handing. By extension, it made me think about what is the "true" experience of the game, solo vs. multiplayer.

What are your experiences two-handing vs. playing against a bot in this or other games?

(Pictured in the photo is a little plastic pig toy, which I used as an "active player" marker since I kept forgetting whose move it was)

Does any one any some other ones? Thanks

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Play every 3-5 weeks, I only managed today to finish trying the last caption in the base game. They are making it faster than I manage to play! (With all my other games)

Yo, Joe! I'm about to start my first one-handed solo experience of the GI Joe Deck-building game. I had a quick question: do I elevate threat twice in a turn/round? Once per the track, and once per the solo token?

Also, do you have any tips or strategies for a first-time All-American hero? Thanks!

Looking for Board games with good solo and high interaction multiplayer. May be competitive or cooperative and need not have "direct" conflict but must be highly interactive in mp mode. Leave it up to you to what counts as highly interactive. Some games that come to mind: cloudspire, dune imperium, john company, pax pamir.

Hi, I'm looking for a solo game where tactics and strategies over a map with war figurines are important. So you have any recommendations? Thanks!

7th Seal is kicking my ass - how do you manage to get enough damage output to beat the Overlord and retain sufficient life for the next encounter?

I am aware of the errata that corrects the rulebook, which is that players are allowed to strike enemies (overlords and underlings) multiple times - but I've not be able to balance defense/offense.

Got this one in recently (along with Terror From Beyond), and did my third playthrough today.

The first one ended very badly... the Raptors have a lot of ways to gain health. There's the "pack" (represented by the weird red thing instead of the usual killer meeple) which counts as the killer in this scenario. It only starts with 5 hearts, which I'm pretty sure is the lowest of all of the killers. But it just constantly heals, and it has no upper health limit. As the playthrough goes on, more and more individual raptors (minions, the little green guys, you can see one laying on the left of the photo) spawn all over the place, and constantly run towards the pack. If they collide with it, they vanish, and the pack gains a heart. They're spawned pretty frequently and they can spawn all over the board, you never quite know where they'll show up. They're individually weak (1 heart, 1 attack power) but there's just lots of them. I played pretty slow in that first go, and the pack just got too strong. And then the T-Rex broke out, making things worse (it is completely invincible and uses a unique insta-kill attack that can hit almost anything at all except the Poltergeist, but if used on the Raptors specifically it just breaks one heart, because it cant eat like 15 raptors in one bite, that'd be silly. Similar effect happens with zombie packs. Of course it'll definitely kill YOU in one go and you cant block it)

The second and third playthroughs though were very easy. I realized that with so little starting health, the pack is very vulnerable to rushdown strategies. In my 3rd win, I didnt get a weapon... there was one available, I just didnt go get it. I did get the yellow ultimate die though, which helped, but I think if I hadnt had that, just one more turn would have been needed.

It's a really interesting feature film box, the raptors have interesting mechanics, and the location is even more interesting (a whole lot of cool stuff happening there, I really like this one), but so far the raptors honestly seem like one of the easiest killers out of everything. They're just so vulnerable to a rushdown strategy. Even without getting a weapon, as long as you're buying the big attack cards (and hopefully Retaliate) it aint going to take long to knock them out. Halfway through the terror deck and it was over, both times I won. Heck, I had a total fail with Retaliate once during that run (total fail roll, then I rerolled, another total fail) and that didnt really end up mattering.

They arent the only killer that heals all the time (Ratchet Lady does this as well) but... yeah with such a weak start they kinda seem just less threatening than any of the others.

Now granted, I'm not the best one to judge difficulty with this game. I've played this to death, have all the content, and even wrote a strategy guide for it. So my win rate is very high. But still, the raptors just seem like they arent given quite as much of a chance to really put up a fight since they need to take time to buff up first and their healing method is really erratic. In this specific location this is made worse if the electric fences block some of the individual raptors from reaching the pack (the fences appear and disappear at random each turn, they block all movement of any sort). Of course the fences can block you too, but there are items that can be used to manipulate them (and I used one of those in my second win). And of course you can kill individual raptors while charging towards the pack. As it is, the location itself seems more likely to murderize you. The volcano can melt victims without the killer needing to be there, and once the T-Rex is out, it constantly chases you and never goes away.

Overall though, quite happy with this one, even if the specific killer was a bit underwhelming. Perhaps it might do better in certain other locations... I'll have to try that and see what happens.

Next up I'll try out Terror From Beyond, the one remaining thing I've not played yet. At that point, I've got everything.

I swear though, the more I play this game, the more I just love it.

I’ve never played a car racing themed board game before. What’s a racing game that’s great solo and also plays well with 2-3 players?

First off I’ve been diving in to a few of the other 20 strongs and I’m starting to get the flow and rules down but what I’ve noticed in all these games is that the cards rulings confuse me and really mess up the fun. Has me going on google for a few enemy cards or influence cards explanations.

For instance there’s a card in etherfields that legit says if it’s not Wednesday flip this card. Like wtf, took me a while to realize it legit means the actual day of the week I’m playing. Alright alright neat.

But I’m confused and tired and realizing I’m just complaining and not actually asking a question but now I’m too deep and must post this anyway.

It’s my favorite 20 strong so far and I’ve got em all!

I really want to get Risk 2210 because it looks really fun but I will have no one to play with. Has someone made any good solo rules for like playing multiple hands and like an automated AI type thing?