Solo modes are apparently the biggest growth category in this hobby right now, every big release seems to ship with an automa deck or a bot flowchart bolted on, and I own several games with genuinely well regarded solo variants that I have never once used, not because I think they’re badly designed, some of them, Mage Knight’s especially, sound like real accomplishments, but because the entire point of this hobby for me is that it’s the one thing Mara and I do that isn’t just parallel screens in the same room.

We work different hours than most couples, and even on nights we’re both actually home at a normal time, it would be very easy to just default to two separate shows on two separate devices, which is fine, plenty of nights that’s exactly what happens and there’s no shame in it. But a game requires you to actually look at the other person, argue about a rules interpretation, watch their face when a plan comes together or falls apart. A solo mode, however clever the bot AI is, gives me a puzzle. It does not give me Mara noticing out loud that I’ve triaged a rules dispute again, which, fair, apparently I do that.

I get the appeal for other people, genuinely, someone who games alone by circumstance rather than preference deserves a good solo experience and I’m glad the industry’s finally taking that seriously instead of treating it as an afterthought bolted onto the back of the rulebook. Some nights I’m sure I’d even like one, there’s an appeal to a quiet hour with just a board and a bot deck and nobody needing anything from you. But I think if I actually built the habit, if solo became a real option I reached for instead of a curiosity I own but ignore, I’d lose the specific discipline that comes from only having one shot at a session, since Mara and I both have to actually want to sit down together for anything to happen at all, which makes the times we do sit down feel more deliberate than they might if I could just default to solo whenever she was busy.

So the solo rulebooks stay in the box, mostly unread, and I’ll admit that’s a slightly wasteful thing to say out loud about games I paid full price for. I don’t think everyone should organize their hobby the way I’ve organized mine, that’s a personal accounting, not a universal rule, some of my favorite reviewers I follow are entirely solo players and their takes are often sharper than mine because they’re not managing a second person’s preferences at all. But for me the two player requirement isn’t a limitation I’m working around. It’s closer to the actual reason I play at all.