There's No Such Thing As a Solo Game
Guest post from Adam Bell | The Lone Toad Newsletter
Welcome to 2025. Well, I’m still on holiday, drinking up the southern summer sun.
But I’m happy to welcome Adam Bell from Adam Bell Games as this edition’s guest writer.
Adam is a tabletop game designer and publisher out of Pittsburgh, PA making roleplaying and storytelling games that are hopefully up your alley.
Adam has an upcoming Kickstarter for Uneasy Lies the Head 2E.
Uneasy Lies the Head is a competitive GMless tabletop roleplaying game where players act as important families embroiling themselves in royal court shenanigans. Devise schemes, spread rumors, enact laws, and take the throne for yourself!
Be sure to follow the Kickstarter campaign here!!!
And is also playtesting The Locked Room, a solo-friendly murder mystery. Check out the link and playtest it today!
In The Locked Room Murder Mystery Game, you'll tell a story of mystery, murder, rumors, and disgrace. Each time you play the game, you'll create a fully unique mystery story! Collaboratively create a bunch of characters, mix them up in a situation ripe for murder, and revel in the detective's investigation. Once the culprit is finally revealed, comb through the journal of clues to make sense of this impossible crime.
But that is enough of that! Let’s check out the article from Adam Bell now!
There’s No Such Thing As A Solo Game
By Adam Bell
When trying to sell my games at a convention, there’s one question I very amusingly dread. “Do you have any solo games?”
Given my catalog and the brief-is-better nature of convention sales conversations, I have two options to answer this question:
People usually know whether or not they’re interested in my brain is a stick of butter from the moment they spot the title, which leads me to choose the right-hand path and try to pitch them on Grasping Nettles and Legend Has It. Both play excellently as solo games, but the vast majority of the time, the solo game seeker is not pleased by this response. They want SOLO GAMES, not games that can be played solo!
There’s No Such Thing As A Solo Game
Bear with me for a second. I will not deny that there are hundreds (thousands?) of roleplaying games that are designed specifically to be played by just one player, and I certainly won’t deny that the designers of these games have done a great job creating these single-player experiences.
What I will deny is the idea that these games can only be played solo. A lot of solo games excel as multiplayer games in the same way that I’d say my multiplayer games excel as solo games. Some are better single player to be sure, but they can be a delightful experience when shared with other people. You might just have to play them in a way the designer didn’t initially intend.
You might think that the proliferation of journaling in the solo sphere is what sets these games apart from their multiplayer cousins, but that’s actually the easiest mechanic to transfer between the two styles of play. Journaling in solo games serves the same play purpose as the conversation in a multiplayer game; players react to the structure provided by the rules of the game to create narrative in their minds and convert that narrative into words. In the journaling game, we lean on the written word, whereas we use the spoken word in the multiplayer game.
In preparing for this article, my partner and I sat down to play the game Auspex by Seb Pines. Auspex is billed as “a tarot based solo journalling game of world building and divination.” You start the game by drawing pairs of major and minor arcana from a tarot deck, comparing those to prompts to generate characters and the questions they bring to you at your divination practice. We fielded questions about churls from an executioner, beauty from a judge, and revolutionary ideals from a beaming youth.
After preparing 7 visitors—enough for one a day in the week leading up to a world-shifting change—you’ll receive them one by one and give them a tarot reading to answer their questions. To do so, choose a tarot spread from the very detailed and evocative list in the book, then reveal and interpret those cards using the chosen spread’s prompts.
To play this multiplayer, you could do one of two things. On one hand, you could have one player act as the diviner and the other players roleplay as the visitors, hamming up some scenes where you play out the readings like they’re really happening. I think that’d be great for groups of 3 or more. With 2, we opted to just play the game cooperatively. We chose which spreads to pull together, interpreted the cards, and described the scenes as a unit. It was a ton of fun!
Alternate Universe Pitches of Games
What would the pitches for these other games look like if we lived in a world where I was actually correct and there was no such thing as a solo game?
Void 1680 AM
In Void 1680 AM, players collaborate to put on a radio show together. There are 3 roles to be split up among the players, with each player either taking on their chosen role for the entire game or simply taking turns inhabiting each role. With fewer than 3 players, you will necessarily have to play multiple roles at once. With more, the extra players can either duplicate roles, or just sit around and listen to the fun.
Play as the presenter to make your voice heard on the airwaves; this is your show after all, and it’s time for you to say what you need to say. Play as the disc jockey to put your knowledge of music to the test; queue up the songs that the presenter will broadcast. Finally, play as the callers to call in to the show seeking advice, giving song requests, telling stories, and generally listening and reacting to the show.
Normally in VOID, the solo player plays all of these roles. It’s great fun! If you haven’t yet, I’d strongly recommend checking out some of the “Affiliate Broadcasts” that Ken puts on the Bannerless Games youtube - they’re the actual playthroughs of the game that players send in for syndication.
Anamnesis
When you play Anamnesis, you will take turns playing the fragments of memory slowly returning to the mind of a shared character who woke up with memory loss. At the start of each of the five acts, your group will draw 3 face down tarot cards from the corresponding deck. You’ll take turns revealing one of those cards, reading the corresponding prompt aloud, and narrating the character’s response to the memory being stirred up by the drawn card.
Anamnesis is a game driven by prompts corresponding to card draws. There are many excellent games that use this mechanic. Some, like the Quiet Year and For the Queen, claim to be for two or more players. Others, like Anamnesis and the Wretched, are for just one player. If you ask me, all of these games are great solo or in small groups! Taking turns narrating and adding to a shared fiction is my bread and butter.
my brain is a stick of butter
In my brain is a stick of butter, one player will attempt to live out a week in their life with ADHD. The other players will roleplay as the competing interests within their brain, pointing out tasks that need to be done in the character’s work, enjoyment, chores, and socializing. Each turn, the task players simultaneously say everything that needs to be done, shouting and lobbying the character for their limited attention. The character then decides what they want to do, using a deck of cards and brain die to see if it’s possible or if they get pulled away by endless distractions.
This is my game and I never thought about how to play this multiplayer until writing this article. It sounds somehow even more stressful than the original game. Oops! One of the ways to turn a solo game into a multiplayer game is to turn it into a one player, many GM-type roleplaying game, which is a style of game I would really like to see more of.
Caveat Emptor
Play out the tense scenes of mischievous commerce between an assistant demon trying to patch up a rocky relationship with the boys back in hell and the unwitting mortals who are about to be cursed with some rotten artifacts. Take turns rolling up artifacts, afflicting them with curses, and roleplaying the customers that stroll into such a wretched shop. To conclude the transaction, make a dice roll to check if the customer notices the curse, update the ledger, and rotate roles for the next customer. Play continues until Mephistopheles returns for the demon’s performance review.
A lot of the solo games I picked up in the Exeunt Press solo bundle would also work well with multiple players. They all have varying degrees of board game influence that add some interesting mechanisms to the turns, so it makes sense that you’d be able to expand them without too much hassle!
Thousand Year Old Campfire, or Old Morris Cave
You are an archaeological team in 1979 under the direction of Prof. Timothy Hutchings performing an excavation on Old Morris Cave in Kentucky. You’ll take turns digging in the cave, excavating all manner of bits and baubles from the dirt. On your turn, you’ll dig through an amount of dirt and refer to a flow-chart in the back of the book. Follow the flow chart, rolling dice as instructed and reading aloud to your colleagues that are currently on break what you’re finding in the dirt. Once done, add your findings to the record and go on break as the next player starts their dig.
A lot of the fun in Old Morris Cave comes from the surprises of the incredibly funny flowcharts, which for some reason communicate really well when read out loud. You could even replace the die rolls with a glance at the other players who must shout a random number for you to continue.
Conclusion
The point of this whole thing is not to stop people from making or enjoying solo games. Please don’t stop actually, because you could write whole articles on how solo games have some of the most interesting design sensibilities in the indie game space due to the fact that having a category like “solo” sets them apart from the dragon-shaped gravitational mass that pulls on every aspect of our hobby.
The point is simple, actually. If you like solo games, there are whole swaths of games you might be ignoring because they claim to be gmless games for multiple players. Try them solo! If you think you don’t like solo games or don’t want to play games by yourself, you can stop ignoring all of the cool stuff going on in solo game design. Check them out and play them with your friends.
Wow, what an excellent article. Thank you, Adam! If you want more of that, why wouldn't you? Check out Adam’s soon-launching newsletter, The Haunted Walrus.
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Thank you again to Adam Bell for being an excellent guest author while I'm drinking in the sun (and drinking other things) on my summer break.
Are you an RPG designer or blogger who wants to write for the Lone Toad? I can't promise money, or fame, or respect. But I can promise exposure (not that kind, wierdo), interest and the best readership of any RPG blog in the world!
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This was a thought provoking article! I broadly agree with the points here. Games marketed for single player play can easily be turned into a multiplayer game, just as games made for a group can be played solo.
I think where the issue arises, at least for me, is that games that are not designed primarily for solo players lack the tools and framing to make playing it solo intuitive and easy. There's few games that can't be played solo, but the trip might be filled with potholes.