Next to legacy games, roll & writes, crowdfunding, polyominoes, and pasting the Marvel IP onto a game system, solo gaming is perhaps one of the biggest recent trends in the board and card game industry.  This can be attributed to several factors including COVID quarantining, strong sales for solo-friendly games, and more.

Personally, it’s taken a fair amount of time for me to really dip my toes in the solo waters.  I was playing multiplayer board and card games years before I ever tried a solo game.  For me, the very act of playing a tabletop game was a social event, first and foremost.  It wasn’t until tabletop gaming took on a bigger role in my life—when it became a regular hobby—that I was no longer able resist the pull of small, simple, critically acclaimed solo games.  I’m still not the type who has the motivation or energy to break out a massive, complex solo game just for myself, but I’ve rapidly discovered that quick & easy solo games often hit the spot.

As Bitewing Games will soon be publishing a quick & easy solo game of our own—Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney (which also plays up to 8 players)—now felt like the right time to investigate, assemble, and share my Top 10 Quick & Easy solo games.  At the end of this list, I’ll also be sharing more info about the Epic Solo Mode that Ryan has developed for Trailblazers.  But regarding all of these games, it should be clarified that when I say “Quick & Easy” I mean quick to play and relatively easy to learn/setup/tear-down.  I do not, by any stretch, imply that these games are easy to win or master.  The compelling challenge is often the best part of a solo game, in my opinion, thus all of these games offer that in some form or another.

Under Falling Skies

As a 20-40 minute game that is filled to the alien gills with juicy decisions, there is perhaps no better way to start this list than with Under Falling Skies.

Under Falling Skies first existed in 2019 as a 9-card print-and-play game, but it was so popular that publisher CGE decided to acquire the license and supe it up with a Kwanchai Moriya coat of paint, a pretty plastic ship production, and a heaping of variety across a campaign of unique boards and challenges.  The experience is a mix between Independence Day’s alien invasion and clever dice worker placement and manipulation.

The gameplay features tense decisions where higher dice values increase the strength of the space they are placed on, but they also accelerate the invasion of the alien ships in the column they are placed in.  The key to victory is balancing risky bonuses against careful defensive manuevers.  You can select your difficulty by flipping the invasion boards between their harder and easier sides, and the campaign offers a wealth of new wrinkles to explore so you’ll always be on your toes with the next challenge.

MicroMacro: Crime City & MicroMacro: Full House

What better way to spend a wintery evening than with a steaming cup of Hot Cocoa and a sprawling map of criminal mysteries?

I recently shared how MicroMacro is another perfect game for couples, but it’s also a great game to enjoy solo.  In a tantalizing mix of Where’s Waldo and murder mystery, MicroMacro challenges players to uncover the truths behind strange and inexplicable deaths.

We recently finished up the 16 wild cases of MicroMacro: Crime City and had a blast solving each and every one. The good news is that the standalone sequel—Full House—is simply more of a good thing.  You can learn more about why we love MicroMacro in my full impressions post.

Friday

Confession time: Friday is the one of a couple games on this list I haven’t played. Yet it still ranks highly among many solo gamers, thus it earned a spot here.  This deck building game has you helping Robinson Crusoe through treacherous island hazards as he prepares for a run-in with pirates.  Overcoming encounters will add more abilities to your deck, yet intentionally losing certain encounters can be a key tactic as well.

Super-Skill Pinball (Roll & Writes)

Most the the roll & write genre is the epitome of quick & easy solitaire games, so I picked my current favorite of the bunch to be on this list.  While roll & writes typically go up to 4 or 8 or infinity players, they also tend to lack any significant element of player interaction.  So the most interaction you’ll get out of many roll & writes is, “Can I roll the dice again, yet?” as you wait for an opponent to fill in a box.

When played solo, there’s zero downtime to Super-Skill Pinball, and you can roll dice and slide the silver balls as quickly as you please.  This design is all about simulating the experience of a pinball table, which it does incredibly well (aside from the speed and reflexes that are involved in real pinball).  Combos abound and tension ratchets up as you fight to keep your pinball from dropping down the center.  Best of all, the variety of tables (4 per game) keeps things fresh and interesting with unique themes and mechanisms including Gopher Gold Mining and disco Dance Fever.

Regicide

One of my favorite recent discoveries has been the brilliantly designed dungeon crawler cooperative game that exists completely in a standard deck of playing cards: Regicide.  Here, you’ll be taking on Jacks then Queens then Kings in a tight game of hand management.  Playing various suits grants abilities, and the aces known as animal companions come in handy as well.  Do yourself a favor and try one of the best card games to be invented in recent years.

The Search For Planet X

The Search For Planet X is one of our household favorite deduction games.  The production is everything I want in a deduction game: smooth, clear, useful, and pretty.  The icing on the cake is the companion app (something I’m not usually fond of in a tabletop game) that keeps the experience slick, quick, and flawless.  The race to figure out what lies in each sector—comet, asteroid, gas cloud, dwarf planet, or most importantly Planet X itself—is both challenging and satisfying.

Oniverse Games

The Oniverse is a solid line of solo games from mammoth publisher Z-Man featuring stylish art, simple rules, quick set-up, short playtime, compact boxes, and clever gameplay.  While there are now five games under this popular brand, I’ve only tried Aerion—the Yahtzee style dice management game.  But from that one game, I found there was plenty to explore between the compelling core loop and the six expansion modules.  For those who wonder where is the best place to start, many folks will point to Onirim and Aerion as two of their favorites.

Cascadia

The big-box titles from publisher Flatout Games tend to offer thinky puzzles with relatively low player interaction—meaning they tend to play similarly at all player counts.  Cascadia is their latest release that has taken the gaming world by storm, and many folks are saying it makes for a great solo experience.  Those who enjoy puzzly tile laying games will be right at home here in this design that celebrates the sites and creatures of the Pacific Northwest with lush art by Beth Sobel.  While it doesn’t venture into the solo rules, Kyle’s How To Play video shows us what Cascadia is all about in under 8 minutes.

Nusfjord

I recently shared my first impressions of a 5-player game of Nusfjord where I essentially said it’s a solid Rosenberg design, but not necessarily one I would play over A Feast for Odin, Agricola, or Le Havre.  Many commenters pointed out to me that Nusfjord is the type of game that really shines at 1-3 players.  I learned that Nusfjord packs a huge punch as a solo game that can be played in only 20-30 minutes.  If you can manage to get a medium-weight Uwe experience by yourself in that amount of time, then Nusfjord absolutely deserves a spot on this list.

Sprawlopolis/Agropolis

Of course I wasn’t going to forget about the quick & easy 18-card design known as Sprawlopolis (or its sibling Agropolis).  This critically acclaimed game has had a lot of mentions across our blog and podcast, including my Top 10 Spatial Puzzle Games.  So rather than retread the same ground, I’ll point you to two glowing video reviews from No Pun Included and The Dice Tower’s Tom Vasel.

Trailblazers—Epic Solo Mode… Playable TODAY on Tabletop Simulator

For Trailblazers, our next upcoming publication, designer Ryan Courtney had two core design focuses:

1. Maintain his high standard of satisfying puzzly depth, but make the rules as simple and approachable as possible
2. Develop compelling solo modes to make this a solo-friendly game as much as it is a family-friendly game

So Trailblazers is exactly the kind of design that fits the topic of quick & easy solo games.   I recently covered that first design focus of approachability, so today we’ll be exploring the solo features that have been on Ryan’s mind since day one.  But we’re not gonna spill the beans on all three modes today.  While the Standard and Adventurers Solo modes have their own exciting objectives that provide a distinguishing flavor, today we’re gonna talk about the biggest of them all: Epic Solo Mode.

Why is it called ‘Epic’ Solo Mode?  Well, the standard game will see you drafting and placing 24 trail cards and 3 campsite cards over the course of 4 rounds or 30 minutes. Epic Solo Mode, on the other hand, can last up to three times as long where you’ll be arranging up to 72 trail cards and 9 campsite cards into one sprawling monstrosity of trails and loops.  While that sounds like absolute insanity (and in some ways, it is), the mode is actually broken up into three separate stages.

Epic Solo Mode utilizes the Animals expansion (included in the standard edition of the Trailblazers), and animal scoring will be your sole focus for the first two stages.  The key to scoring big animal points is to have several unique animal tokens placed along a loop; but the catch is that a trail card with an animal token on it can never be overlapped (partially or fully) by another card, which limits your spatial flexibility.  I go into more details about how the animals expansion works here.  

Stage 1 is simply called “Epic Solo Mode” where if you manage to scrounge at least 30 animal points after 4 rounds of play then you win the mode!  But 30 animals points can be quite challenging to reach—it took me several attempts to finally beat this stage.  

Once victory is achieved in Epic Solo Mode, you can simply call it a day and pack it away as you rest on the laurels of your 30-minute triumph… Or, you can continue on to the first bonus stage called Springer Fever.  The objective of Springer Fever?  Build off of the foundation you’ve laid in the Epic Solo Mode and win Springer Fever by scoring 80 or more animal points from loops after 4 more rounds of play.  If victory is achieved, you may continue on to the final bonus stage, if you wish.  This is the stage that I’ve yet to overcome, although my last attempt was quite close.

If you manage to beat Springer Fever, then the final stage you may continue on to is Triple Crown.  Once again, you’ll build off of the foundation you’ve laid in Springer Fever, but this time you’ll aim to get a high score by scoring only the single longest loop of each trail type after 4 more rounds of play.  By breaking up loops, extending them, and reconnecting them, you’ll be able to get a high score!  Although animal scoring no longer matters, the tricky part will be that you still can’t overlap cards with animal figures placed on them from the previous two stages.

The challenge that Epic Solo Mode and its two bonus stages provide is one with a dizzyingly high skill-ceiling that will keep folks coming back for many sessions.  While it certainly isn’t an easy mode to take on, I’ve found myself learning and improving with each attempt, and that satisfaction of progress far outweighs my failures.  Over time, you’ll go from a short-term focus of lunging for easy animal points to a long-term focus of planning how to make the longest loops for Triple Crown.

This mode is one that has been thoroughly tested and played by Ryan’s play testers, and it is one that Ryan and Tim even turned into a gnarly challenge for themselves to hit 165 points in Triple Crown (the final stage).  They even recorded many of their attempts on Youtube with Game 12 being their final triumph.

While learning about Epic Solo Mode is all good and fine, the real fun comes from actually playing it which you can do RIGHT NOW.  That’s right, Epic Solo Mode is available for you to play on TableTop Simulator (a game/app which you can download from Steam).  Simply use this link to find the Trailblazers mod, click subscribe to download it to your TTS app, and then open TTS and find it in your Workshop.

Follow Trailblazers all the way to its Q2 Crowdfunding launch! Subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter where we’ll be teasing out more details, art, and components over the coming weeks.

Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite, including the upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post Top 10 Quick & Easy Solo Games + Play Trailblazers Epic Solo TODAY appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Nick is joined by his lovely wife, Camille, as they discuss their Top 10 Board Games for Couples.  Whether you have a SO, a friend, or a stranger willing to play a 2-player game with you, we think you’ll find some killer suggestions within this discussion.

1:29 – Meet Camille
5:57 – About this list
7:53 – Cami’s 1st pick
11:29 – Nick’s Best Huge Sprawling Game
16:29 – Cami’s favorite no brain required game & Nick’s Most Prized Possession
20:46 – Nick’s Best Cooperative Game
23:43 – Cami’s next polyomino pick
25:08 – Nick’s Most Addictive Game
28:48 – Cami’s Chess-style preference
30:43 – Nick’s Most Polarizing Game
34:43 – Cami’s go-to card game
37:08 – Nick’s Best Non-Confrontational Game
40:31 – Cami & Nick’s Endlessly Entertaining Pick
44:17 – Nick’s Best AP-Inducing Game(s) + Cami’s similar alternative
50:13 – Cami’s favorite classic
53:21 – Nick’s Old Reliable Choice
56:03 – Cami’s final pick
59:00 – Nick & Cami’s Favorite New Game
1:06:11 – An exciting upcoming reveal… (Click here to follow along)

The post Top 10 Board Games for Couples — Podcast Exclusive appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Tis the season to buy more board games for your friends and family! Our 2020 Holiday Board Game Gift Guide is here to guide you to some of the best options available. Whether you’re looking to get your significant other the best surprise or hoping to find the perfect game for your holiday party, we’re here to help you find the cream of the crop!

Browse all the lists by clicking through the page numbers at the bottom, or use the links below to take you directly to the most relevant list for your needs. If any game mentioned catches your eye, click on the provided link (on the game’s title) to find some options for purchasing it.

Note: This is a completely unsponsored article, and none of the information or links provided generate a profit for us in any way. This article is written purely as service to you from genuine fans of board gaming who love to share this awesome hobby. This list has been carefully assembled to be ultimate gift guide, whether you’re looking to buy the hottest new game or find a reliable classic. We sincerely hope we can help you and your gift receiver find your next favorite game.

• Gifts for the Hobbyist Board Gamer in your life
• Gifts for the Casual Board Gamer in your life
• Gifts for your Significant Other
• Stocking Stuffer Games (small & cheap!)
• Perfect games for your Holiday Party

Continue on to Page 2: Gifts for the Hobbyist Board Gamer

The post 2020 Holiday Board Game Gift Guide appeared first on Bitewing Games.

I’ve recently started playing these new-ish releases. Here are my current thoughts on them:

Super Skill Pinball 4-Cade

Take all your roll & writes and toss them out the window because Super Skill Pinball 4-Cade is the new king of the hill!

…Okay, perhaps you can still keep your other games, but what makes this one the best of the bunch? It’s simple. This game captures the essence of pinball unbelievably well. You’ve got the brilliant half-pinball tokens that slide around your over-the-top thematic table (player mat). There’s push-your-luck nudging and tilting, there’s bumper combos, there’s flipper aiming, there’s objectives within the table, there’s multiball bonanzas, you name it!

Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade doesn’t circumvent the main weakness of the roll & write genre—zero player interaction—but it does raise the bar for the genre as a whole. Everything I love about a solid roll & write (satisfying combos, good variety, tense decisions, evolving strategies with more experience, etc.) is here with a beautifully tailored glove of pinball wrapped around it. It forces every other game in this crowded realm to scramble to justify its existence. The biggest weakness you’ll see in this roll & write compared to others is that one player’s game of pinball can end earlier than another’s. We almost never play roll & writes above the 2-player count, so this isn’t much of an issue for us.

Yet the game is so much more than our “favorite roll & write”. It’s freaking pinball the tabletop game. The design/publishing team’s love of pinball oozes from every nook and cranny of this box. The core gameplay here is so solid, and the thematic tables are so diverse and fun, that this is the kind of game where I won’t hesitate to purchase every single expansion they throw at me. That said, if you don’t love pinball, or you don’t like roll & writes, then I don’t see this game changing your mind in any way.

So many designers/publishers are tossing their old, stale fruit of existing IPs and/or half-hearted efforts into the roll & write blender for a generic, flavorless game smoothie. Meanwhile, Geoff Engelstien and co. have been toiling away to grow their own fresh, ripe, exotic fruits and plucking them to concoct the most flavortastic blend of roll & write and pinball your taste buds have ever encountered.

Current Rating: 9/10

Pan Am

Pan Am is a solid choice among many lesser games on supermarket shelves. You get a solid worker placement, auctioning, economic experience with a crisp presentation and unique theme.

My favorite aspect is most certainly the combination of bidding for worker placement actions. Players must decide how valuable a worker placement spot is to them and others and place their tokens accordingly. Sometimes you may get away with a cheap action because nobody else wanted it that round, but often you’ll find yourself getting bumped out because somebody else was willing to pay more.

The requirements to obtain landing rights and options for accomplishing this provide another handful of interesting tactical routes. There are costly options to build airports that can make for a great long-term investment or easy options to spend cards that you can quickly regret discarding when you need them later.

I just wish Pan Am wasn’t so long and slow. The 4 phases of the 7 rounds seem to keep crawling long past the game has outstayed its welcome. The gameplay struggles to keep a brisk pace with too many steps, too much interruption of plans, and too many decisions. Contrast this with much more complex games like Brass: Birmingham and you’ll quickly see why Pan Am takes just as long, if not longer.

Brass flows elegantly from one round to the next with players playing two cards to take two actions. The 3 steps of a round are simple: 1) All players take two actions 2) Rearrange turn order 3) Collect income. Only 1 of these 3 steps requires analytical thinking that can mostly be planned out before your turn, the other 2 are quick and easy. Meanwhile, Pan Am has roughly a dozen steps with each round, with about half of them requiring strategic planning, and this kind of planning often can’t be done until it’s your turn to take the action.

If the downtime and playtime could magically be cut in half, I’d be all for more Pan Am. As it is, I’m content with sticking to my better-paced collection of Euros.

Current Rating: 6/10

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

Alright, it’s true…. This is a stinking good co-op game. Jaws of the Lion just gets better with each play.

Scenario 1 is too mindlessly easy to judge the game by, but I was interested by the framework that had been laid. Scenario 2 added some interesting layers, but seemed to reveal that we had a problematic setup.

Our biggest issue up to that point was the Voidwarden being significantly underwhelming in a 2-player game. This character seemed to thrive best on a map with more players and monsters. In our first couple scenarios, we had several rounds where the Voidwarden’s turn was completely worthless due to ending up too far away from her only teammate who was able to mow down all monsters within reach.

Fortunately, this issue has seemed to balance itself out in Scenarios 3 & 4. Things improved for our experience due to three main factors:

1) The difficulty increased (thus Voidwarden was more needed each round).
2) Voidwarden’s deck improved (more cards get added or swapped between each tutorial scenario).
3) Our communication and cooperation has improved. Now that we understand the Voidwarden’s strengths and weaknesses better, we have seen much more interesting cooperation with her.

Our most recent scenario transformed my wife from a reluctant teammate to an engaged and entertained schemer. Voidwarden’s abilities ended up being instrumental to our fun and critical to our success.

All this talk and I’ve only scratched the surface of what I predict to be one of the most influential and important games of the past decade. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a masterclass in board game accessibility. It takes a game that I would never dare touch and kicks down every wall that was keeping me from joining in on the fun.

For us, Gloomhaven is too expensive, too fiddly, too huge, too complicated, too long, too intimidating, too stuffy, too exhausting, etc. etc. etc. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, is NONE of those things, and yet it is still Gloomhaven. Outside of the general streamlining that the gameplay received, the tutorial and spiral-o bound scenario books are brilliant features of what has to be the all-time best tabletop game found on Target shelves. Instead of sorting through mounds of tiles and laboring to piece and stack them together only to later organize them apart, you simply flip open the book to the next page and WAM, there’s your map with the scenario description and helpful icons ready to rumble.

Don’t get me wrong; this game is no walk in the park to setup, tear down, learn, and play. It’s still an option we’re only going to break out on game nights where our energy level is above average. It’s still a strenuous, uphill hike (with beautiful vistas, of course)…. but now it’s on a smooth, paved path with comfy benches, tasty snacks, and cozy restrooms along the way. Bravo, Isaac Childres and Cephalofair Games! Everybody else, take notes.

Current Rating: 9/10

Unmatched: Cobble & Fog / Jurassic Park / Bruce Lee

When I first tried Unmatched, I was lukewarm yet amused by the series. The stellar art and production helped me to see past the somewhat simplistic, shallow gameplay and appreciate it for the light fun it provides. Fortunately, I stuck around for more because each new offering has only gotten better.

From ganging up on your prey as a pack of clever-girl raptors to unleashing a combo of fury as Bruce Lee, Unmatched has become an enjoyable mashup of zany head-to-head showdowns. While I appreciate any game that puts my boy Sasquatch to good use (from the Robin Hood vs. Bigfoot pack), I would rank all three of these latest packs as the best of the bunch.

Cobble & Fog is an especially good place to jump in, with 4 classic characters that provide highly thematic decks. The Invisible Man essentially teleports from one fog token to the next, keeping opponents swinging and missing. Sherlock manipulates his opponent’s decks to his advantage. Dracula seeps life from his prey while Jekyll & Hyde flip-flops from one strength to the other.

Unmatched will be one to keep an eye on in the future. Expect to see more Jurassic Park (including an XL T-rex), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and an extremely creative 4-character fan pack that will result from a design contest with over 500 deck submissions. I’ll be gunning for my boy, Paul Bunyan, and his trusty companion, Babe the Blue Ox, to make it to the finished product. My wife and I had a blast designing and testing a deck rampant with giant axe swinging, ox plowing, and tree chopping.

Current Rating: 7-8/10

Blitzkrieg!

Alright, alright, I know this isn’t necessarily a “recent” release. But Blitzkrieg is under a year old and perpetually out of stock, and I feel it my civic duty to inform you that this one deserves your best efforts to acquire a copy at the next reprint.

I’ve always been a fan of Ethnos, despite it’s exhaustive attempts to repel me with it’s looks and production. As it turns out, I’m simply a big fan of designer Paolo Mori.

Blitzkrieg! had a similar first-impression effect upon me as Ethnos did. I saw the box cover, I saw the board, I saw the pieces, and I didn’t see a reason to look any further. It wasn’t until I heard the stellar reviews from multiple sources that I finally steered myself around for another look.

Thank goodness I listened, because Blitzkrieg! is an excellent 2-player game! The rules are easy, the game is quick, the decisions are agonizing, and the fun is instantaneous. This feels like a nice mixture between Watergate’s tug-of-war gameplay, Air Land & Sea’s theatric struggle, and Samurai’s shielded tile placement strategies.

This one is self-dubbed as “the perfect wargame for non-wargamers,” and I’m inclined to agree. Now if I can just track down a copy of that Godzilla expansion…

Give me more of that Paolo Mori, please!

Current Rating: 9/10

This concludes my latest new release 1st impressions, but if you missed the previous one, you can check out my thoughts on Pendulum, Calico, Fort, Spicy, and Ride the Rails. Have you tried any of these games yet? What are your thoughts on them?

Article written by Nick Murray. To learn more about his tabletop gaming tastes and preferences, check out his blog series: Tabletop Tastes: My Favorite Flavors in Board Games. To follow his designs as they come to fruition, subscribe to our newsletter and follow Bitewing Games on social media!

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