Why I Won't Play a Heavy Game Solo

I own three games with genuinely well-regarded solo modes, automas people rave about in the same breath as the base game, and I have not played a single one of them alone. Not once. This is not a principled stance I arrived at through careful thought, or it wasn’t originally, it’s just a preference I noticed I had, and once I noticed it I started defending it harder than it probably deserved. Another weekend passed and I noticed I’d done it again, three heavy games back on the shelf, automas untouched, same as always.

Here’s my actual reasoning, such as it is. Half of what I get from a heavy game is the argument about it afterward. Not a fight, an argument in the older sense, the back and forth about whether a decision was actually correct or just lucky, whether the game let someone win or someone earned it. An automa doesn’t have opinions. It executes a flowchart and I either beat the flowchart or I don’t, and there’s a specific flatness to that outcome that I can’t talk myself out of feeling, no matter how cleverly the flowchart is designed. I’ve read the reviews. People whose taste I trust say the bot AI in some of these games is elegant, is a real design achievement in its own right, is worth the box price alone. I believe them. I still don’t reach for it.

The honest version of this, and I try to be honest about my own biases the same way I’d flag one in someone else’s argument, is that I think I’m slightly afraid of what a solo session would tell me about how much of my enjoyment is actually the game and how much is Dana rolling their eyes at a bad play, or the specific texture of a Thursday table arguing about whether a house rule from three weeks ago even applies here. I suspect the answer is more of the latter than I’d like to admit, and there’s a version of me that would rather not run that experiment.

So the automas sit in the box, unused, and I’ll defend that as a real choice rather than a wasted feature, because I think what I actually value about these games was never fully in the rulebook to begin with. It was always going to require other people in the room. I could be wrong about that. I haven’t opened the box to find out.