Alone Against the Boredom

Now that joke is out of the way, we can move on with the project 🙂 Up until 2020 solo gaming was the awkward uncle of the tabletop family, the one everyone preferred to avoid at gatherings and didn’t really talk about with people outside of the family. I’ve had a more complicated relationship with it. Between living alone and the struggle to get adults together for regular gaming, I had dabbled in solo games and variants. In fact, I have amassed a stack of board games, RPGs and wargames with solo rules. I had visions of sitting in the evenings, drink in hand, whiling away the hours with my analogue games. When push came to shove, I ignored all of them in favour of video games.

Unsurprisingly for a librarian, a good story is the nucleus around which my hobbies orbit. Being pulled into new worlds, falling in love with characters and NPCs, and the visceral thrill of a twist, betrayal or reveal are the ultimate forms of escapism for me. The immersive storytelling of video games is often second to none. I’ll tolerate bad mechanics for a great story but never the reverse. On the tabletop, my narrative experiences have been largely limited to RPGs as most of the board and wargamers I play with aren’t overly concerned with telling a cool tale.

As we begin 2021 in another tier 4 lockdown here in the Land of Haggis, I’ve been feeling a need to switch off the screens, put down the controller and even walk away from the virtual tabletops that got me through 2020. It’s time to explore the analogue pile of shame. Can I get similar storytelling experiences without AI or a DM?

Many of the games in my solo collection suggest keeping notes and in some cases writing out detailed entries is the bulk of the game. I don’t know all of those notes will make it into this project but I will certainly put up a lot of them. Obviously by focusing on narrative, some games will have stories randomly generated and unique to me. Others will be pre-written and sit firmly in spoiler territory. Where a game has a discoverable story, I’ll keep posts spoiler free and not include any of the notes in photos etc.

This project’s goal is to act as a digital record of the journey for myself and perhaps to be a tale (cautionary or not remains to be seen) for others in the community interested in the solo side of tabletop.