Gaming with Covid

Hey everyone! (You like how I’m pretending anyone is reading this…or rather…do I like how I’m pretending that anyone is reading this? I do!)

If you are, in fact, here, then thank you! It’s been a bit. Got busy at the end of summer, and then I went to the county fair and caught Covid. It’s my first bout. I thought, you know, it’s outside. It’ll be fine. Didn’t wear a mask. Caught it. So far no one else that we met there caught it, so I dunno. Guess I’m the lucky one, if lying on the couch hacking and aching makes one lucky.

But since I’ve been ill and isolating (instead of being sick and alone, for a change), I’ve been thinking a lot about solo games. Do you play with yourself? Or rather, by yourself?

Growing up, no one in my family ever wanted to play board games with me. My parents were too busy. My brother would start fights if he wasn’t going to win. We have a history of broken Mouse Trap contraptions and torn Sequence boards and other endgame casualties (I’ll bet the people who moved into our childhood home are still finding Monopoly bits). The solution was to set up, play, and put away games all by myself. Sometimes I even played with the real rules of the game just to see how it went. Otherwise, I played solitaire, which my stepdad taught me eventually.

Over the years, though, I started buying games that were meant for solo play. The first one I got was Palm Island, a little resource management game in a deck of cards you rotated as you acquired and spent things. I only played it a few times, and then I moved on.

I got bit by the solo bug again when I saw Deep Space D6, a simple dice game where you have to survive a wave of enemy space ships and a boss by allocating different die faces to different actions. I played this one quite a bit, since it’s a unique challenge with every shuffle. I can breeze right through one game and fight like hell to get through a single card another time.

I still pull it out from time to time, but to be honest, it’s way easier to play the app that was released for it.

The newest solo game I’ve acquired, the one that’s been keeping me company during my convalescence, was something I learned about on Heavy Cardboard. It’s called Beaches for the Brave, and it’s a dice-based war game based on actual historical scenarios where U.S. soldiers stormed beaches.

If you know me, you might be surprised to learn that I actually showed any interest at all in this one. I’m not in on the concept of war, and anything based in history is sort of an instant snooze for me. And yet.

This one has you moving up tracks based on die rolls, one die per living soldier, with the enemy firing after, one die per bunker section left undamaged. This one is TOUGH. Even with good luck, things can go sour pretty quick. Each map has some special rules for terrain or conditions or actions you can and can’t use. It’s a fun one, and sobering when you think of the actual situations that spawned them.

If you’re looking for this one, you have to get it directly from the designer Mike Lambo’s Amazon shop. Click here for the link. It’s not too expensive, as it’s just the book with a different scenario on every page. You have to provide your own dice and bits for it or write on the pages or make copies. It’s worth it, though.

Hopefully, with any luck, my Covid will clear up in the next few days. I’ve canceled our next game night out of an abundance of caution, but we’ll be back to it before you know it. And I’ll be back to my top 100 games list in a few days.

Once again, I appreciate your eyeballs.

~Justin