 |
|
It’s better to state it clearly from the beginning: if you like
to play a solitaire game every once in a while, you’re not weird.
Solitaire games were born when there was a much higher probability to
be alone: think of Napoleon at St. Helen, who played often the solitaire
card game that still bears his name.
Even if today it’s easy to meet a hundred people a day and it’s
possibile to connect via the Internet to millions of gamers, sometimes
playing solitaire is plain relaxing.
There are, in any case, two broad categories of gamers which have to
tackle long sessions in solitude: the first one is made of authors. After
having created the first prototype, and before showing it to anyone else,
they have to split their personality and deal themselves four different
hands of cards, or set up the pieces for a six-player game, perhaps giving
each of them a different playing style – an interesting case for
psychiatrists all over the world.
The second category is made up by games collectors: these martyrs of gaming
are the ones who keep the market afloat, and have to undertake the hard
and unforgiving task of explaining the rules to mobs of friends which,
in a “beer and pretzels game”, more often than not appreciate
the beer and the pretzels more than the game itself. The better way to
capture the attention of the “pupils” is to learn all the
mechanics of the game beforehand, to keep the explanation the shortest
possible. What better way than playing a game against oneself?
Thus, in these pages we are going to present solitaire boardgaming. The
topic is huge: in the first part, instead of compiling a simple list of
titles, we are going to try to understand in how many different ways one
can implement the solitaire practice when the presence of a flesh-and-blood
opponent would almost seem a necessary prerequisite. In this first part
we’ll focus on so-called “German games”, which lend
themselves better to the analysis of the game mechanics. In the second
parte we’ll take a step back in time to examine the first examples
of solitaire play in wargames, which are definitely out of fashion today,
but dominated the gaming landscape for the whole 70s and 80s.
A last premise before going on: several solitaire systems implement more
than one mechanism to “run” the game: for the sake of simplicity,
we’ll divide them up according to the principal one.
Player VS Luck
Tre broadest category of solitaire games is based on the challenge between
Man and Fate. In less pompous words, success and failure depend not only
on the choices of the player, but also on luck.
Card games, using French or other kinds of standard cards (in Italy, for
example, we use the typical 40-card decks) are certainly the most common
kind of solitaire games of the last centuries. Who hasn’t ever played
SPIDER or KLONDIKE, maybe on the screen of a computer powerful enough
to render in real-time a Pixar movie?
It’s a pity that many solitaire games look very similar to each
other (which has given birth to books like “100 card solitaire games,
90 almost identical”), when cards can be used in a much more creative
way… we are presenting this category anyway, at the beginning of
our overview, because we recognize that they are the foundation of a long
series of games which use cards in the most different ways.
Passing to much more interesting games, fate is implemented in a brilliant
way in WINGS OF WAR - BURNING DRACHENS (Andrea Angiolino and Pier Giorgio
Paglia - Nexus, 2005).
In this new edition of the aerial dogfighting game, the introduction of
new elements (anti-aircraft flak and snipers) has allowed for the first
time the creation of solo scenarios. The player has to prepare his mission,
usually based on an attack against enemy trenches of aerostatic balloons,
having only a fixed number of turns to carry it out.
Each time that, maneuvering his plane, the player falls in the firing
range of sinipers or flak, he has to pick a card to see if they shoot
and, in that case, another to see if he got hit and the damage received.
Anti-aircraft usually does less damage than enemy planes, so the player
must organize his attack in the best way to gain good firing chances without
remaining too much time exposed to enemy retaliation. The enemy, thus,
is nothing else than Fate, since the enemy attacks as soon as possibile.
The weird thing is that ina similar game (set during WWI) this mechanic
is much more realistic than it could appear, since at that time most fights
were won also (or mainly?) because of luck…
 A
famous solitaire classic is the old CHAINSAW WARRIOR (Games Workshop,
1987). The player plays a tough, heavily armed clod who find himself thrown
among zombies and other assorted monsters, while the evil character “Darkness”
(!) wants to destroy New York.
Each turn the player picks a card representing an event (usually a monster
encounter), decides which weapon to use and throws the dice according
to that choice, hoping to get a successful outcome and another turn of
survival…
The fame reputation of this game is really a mystery: for today’s
standard one could almost say it’s a “non-game”, since
the choices are severely limited and his chances of survival are based
mostly on the initial die rolls, which determine the character’s
physical abilities.
The game, so to speak, “plays itself”, although we must admit
that – thanks to the nice graphics and the fun setting – it’s
a pleasant experience every once in a while.
Player VS Bot
We are borrowing from the videogaming world the concept of “bot”:
in many online games, bots are used to substitute for one or more human
players. They are virtual players, programmed according to a series of
fixed rules (like “if you see the player, shoot. If he throws a
grenade, run”. Sadly the real programming is not that simple, but
it’s just to give an idea…).
A simple bot in the boardgaming world would be the monster from FINSTERE
FLURE (Friedeman Friese - 2F-Spiele, 2003). When he has to move, the monster
takes a certain number of steps, but if “looking around” he
manages to “spot” a player-driven character, he turns and
start to “follow”.
Here the terms “looking around”, “spot” and “follow”
seem to indicate a certain degree of intelligence which, actually, the
monster lacks. In fact, “look around” means “check if
there’s a pawn on your row or column”, “spot”
means “check if there is no obstacle between monster and pawn”
and “follow” would be better described by the sentence “rotate
the monster 90 degrees and start moving in that direction”.
The artifice is clear, but that notwithstanding, the monster’s behavior
appears coherent within the game world, which leads us to believe that
FINSTERE FLURE would be a nice solitaire game. Try to put together a rule
set!
 More
elegant bots are those present in AL CABOHNE (Uwe Rosenberg - Amigo, 2000),
the solitaire version (although it’s playable by 2 humans, too)
of the classic BOHNANZA.
Three unpleasant characters (Al Cabohne, Don Corlebohne and Joe Bohnano)
from the “bean mafia” are challenging the player. During the
game each of the three bosses start collecting a particular kind of bean
choosing it by chance or among the player’s discards. When the price
of the bean field reaches the level set by the boss (1, 2 or 3 coins),
it get automatically sold.
AL CABOHNE has been the inspiration "THE LONE GUNSLINGER", the
solo variant for BANG! that you can find in this issue of GiocAreA OnLine.
The idea, by the way, was probably already in the air, since one of our
readers (Luca Revello) has recently created a very different solitaire
variant of BANG!, which we are going to show you in the next future.
Player VS a Story
The classical way (and very common in the 80s) to play “against
a story” in solitaire is represented by the so-called “gamebooks”,
better known in the anglosaxon world as “Choose Your Own Adventure”
books.
Gamebooks are a sort of hypertextual entertainment on paper: in simple
words, books that let you play. Perusing a gamebook one can instantly
note that the text is divided in hundreds of progressively numbered paragraphs.
To start, you have to read the first paragraph, which typically contains
the beginning of a story. At the end, you will be presented many different
options, each linked to another paragraph numer. For example: “You
keep walking (23) or you stop and talk to the old man (149)?”. Once
an option has been chosen the reader has to jump and read the corresponding
paragraph, which will lead to other story paths…
The mechanism we have described, together with a simple dice-based combat
system (as in the most successful series, the fantasy “LONE WOLF”
by Joe Dever, which sold 8 million copies...) and perhaps additional skills
and inventory systems, has been enough to ensure the gamebooks’
success.
Sometimes the authors have been able to add particularly clever innovations:
in the SORTILEGE books (written by Steve Jackson), for example, before
starting the game the reader must “study magic” committing
to memory a series of 3-letter magic formulas with their effect. The anxiety
of finding oneself face to face with a vicious monster without knowing
if it’s better to yell “HOT” rather than “RES”
expresses well the sense of powerlessness of someone who embarked into
an adventure without the necessary preparation!
Anyway, we have already talked at length about gamebooks in issue #10
of GAOL (Italian only, sorry!), so we’ll not delve further, pointing
the interested reader to the site http://www.magnamund.net/ramas/
The boardgamer will perhaps be more interested in experimenting a fusion
of the gamebook mechanics with a real, full-fleged boardgame: an example
is TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS (Eric Goldberg - West End Games, 2005),
where the random encounters on the map are resolved by reading the correspondent
paragraphs on the included booklet…
Another very interesting game is SHERLOCK HOLMES CONSULTING DETECTIVE
(Gary Grady, Suzanne Goldberg & Raymond Edwards - Kosmos, 1981), a
sort of murder party game playable (also) solo. The box contains all the
clues necessary to solve several crimes playing the role of the famous
detective, questioning suspects, reading the local paper and much more…
We finally cite here, although it’d deserve a category unto itself,
Beniamino Sidoti’s crazy “solitaire live role-playing game”
with the unlikely title MUCHO GRAXXIAS VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY
AND THE VAMPIRE ON THE PIRATES' SHIP IN A PERFECT STORM (i Giochi del
2000, 1996).
Player VS a Puzzle
 Another
classic way of playing with no opponents is the puzzle game: this is so
true that the very game of “solitaire” falls in this category.
We are actually referring to SOLITAIRE, the game in which you have to
jump a peg with another to capture it and you have to remain with a single
surviving peg.
Games much more fascinating in this category are the ones from ThinkFun,
like RUSH HOUR or TIPOVER. Every one of them shares the same main approach:
given a starting state and constraints on the possibile moves, the player
has to reach a particular goal state (remain with a single peg, drive
one’s car out of the traffic…).
Even TANGRAM, in its own way, represents an incarnation of the same gaming
concept: the starting state is a bunch of pieces in different geometrical
shapes (triangle, square, etc.). The pieces can be combined freely, but
the player must use them all; the goal is composing a particular shape.
It seems, though, that we are moving farther and farther away from the
kind of games usually considered by GiocAreA’s readers...
Player VS an Abstract
Abstracts (like checkers, or GIPF) are an extremely old category of games.
There isn’t yet a total agreement on the definition of “abstract
game”, but in short, we could say that the main characteristic is
that a pawn is just... a pawn, all the pieces are visible and there is
no luck. This definition is quite imprecise, because it would exclude
games like CHESS (where every piece represents a military unit), several
DOMINO variants (with hidden pieces) or BACKGAMMON (where the players
rolla die to move), but we have to content ourselves. We are going to
consider here every possibile kind of abstracts, anyway...
 One of
the best recent abstracts playable in solitarie is BLOKUS (Bernard Tavitian
- Alary Games, 2000): each turn the player must place one of his 21 “poliminos”
on a checkered board in such a way that it touches the corner of a previously
played piece.
While the multiplayer game is based on spatial control and invasion of
enemy territory, two solitaire variants are included: the best is probably
the one that asks the player to place on the board alla the 84 pieces
(in 4 colors) according to the simple rule above.
Another very interesting, recent abstract is INGENIOUS (aka EINFACH GENIAL,
aka MENSA GAME… Reiner Knizia - Fantasy Flight, 2004), a game “from
1 to 4 brains”, as the box says.
On a board made of hexagons the players place, in turn, pieces made up
of two hexes with a common side.
 Each
hex contains one of six different symbols: every time a piece is played,
an imaginary line is traced in every direction; all the symbols of the
same color on that lines are worth one point. However at the end of the
game, as in EUPHRAT & TIGRIS, the only score that counts is the lowest
one. It’s possibile to play this game solo, picking randomly one
piece after the other and placing them on the board, trying to maximize
the final score. It’s a nice challenge, but it could be even better
if the game defined in advance score intervals corresponding to different
“degrees of victory”. For example, which is the maximum theoretical
score?
Another very brilliant abstract game (and it’s free!) for 1 or 2
players is Jean-Francois Lassonde’s MICROPUL.
The game is made of 48 tiles, all different. Each side of a tile can
contain a micropul (a white or black solid circle) or a catalyst (one
or two little dots, or a plus sign).
The aim of the game is to connect all the tiles playing them one by one,
creating big conglomerates of micropuls of the same color. Micropuls act
as “glue” between two tiles, that can be placed next to each
other only if they share a micropul on the common side. Catalysts allow
to pick new tiles (and this is the only way to get new tiles besides the
starting six). We won’t delve further, since you can find the (simple)
rules online at this address:
http://neutralbox.com/micropul/
If it’s not enough, you can also play online with a handy Flash
interface: the address is http://hozo.hp.infoseek.co.jp/micropul/index.html
MICROPUL is one of the most fun solitaire games ever, which requires the
player to ponder carefully every move.
Player VS a Record
We admit it: this taxonomy is stretching a little bit too far. Wanting
to break a record, in fact, is more like an impulse to play than a true
opponent. Sometimes, though, the urge to beat one’s own time or
score is a good motive to keep playing, as all those who have spent years
trying to solve RUBIK’S CUBE in the shortest possible time, long
after having memorized the resolution algorithms, know well.
The difference between solitaire playing in BLOKUS vs. MICROPUL is thus
evident: the former has a “solution” (the games “is
beaten” or not), the latter ends in any case, but it’s possibile
to calculate one’s own score and try to beat it.
This record-seeking is common to many of the games we are already presented
in this article and, more broadly, in this whole issue. The classic DUNGEON
QUEST (Dan Glimne - Games Workshop, 1987 – see “Golden Oldies”),
for example, is in itself little more than a game “VS Luck”,
but one can write down the number of gems obtained and try to beat that
score the next time.
This possibility is explicitly stated in LORD OF THE RINGS (Reiner Knizia
- Kosmos, 2000), which contains a (“Heroes’ Gallery”)
sheet whose purpose is just to keep track of the best scores. There are
many variants that allow to play that one solitaire…
Another fun pastime is to run around the track solo in the just-released
BOLIDE (Ghenos Games, 2005), a very clever and enriched remake of LA PISTA
(“The Track”), a traditional paper-and-pencil game played
by middle-schoolers all over Italy since forgotten times. The rules do
not explicitly anticipate solitaire playing, but it’s very easy
to keep running around the track trying to beat one’s own best lap.
Of course this is also true for other racing simulations (PITSTOP, FORMULA
DÈ…), but it fits particularly well such a game, which the
constant search of the “perfect path” makes almost similar
to a puzzle game.
And now something completely different: wargames and such
Let’s move our focus now from classic card games and modern “designer
games”, or German games, or Eurogames... or whatever you want to
call them (argh) to good, old-fashioned wargames.
In fact, although most of the war simulations are made for more than one
player (typically 2), it’s fairly common for a single “grognard”
to tackle the long setup and the even longer play of a battle with no
company but his own curiosity and strategic theories. More often than
not the wargamer, always observant of the quality of the simulation, rather
than winning is interested in seeing “what would have happened if”
at Gettysburg Pickett instead of charging... or if Napoleon had decided
not to... and at Zama, maybe, if the elephants... you got the concept.
And then there’s the desire to replay that particular situation
that came up during the last battle, perhaps to be better prepared next
time!
This kind of solitaire experiments, almost scientific rather than ludic,
are made easier by the fact that most wargames don’t have secret
information, which tend to abound in german games. Of course there are
some exceptions, mainly “block games” (from Columbia... the
ones with the little wooden blocks, set upright to keep the units’
identity hidden... think Wizard Kings?) and “card-driven”
wargames, strategic-level sims based on a card mechanic which, from the
dynasty founder WE THE PEOPLE, have enjoyed a great success that spawned
masterpieces like Ted Raicer’s famous PATHS OF GLORY.
If we refer to the taxonomy presented above, most of these games uses
pre-programmed “bots”: it’s the case of TIME TRIPPER,
a tactical fighting game from SPI (James F. Dunnigan, 1980) which won’t
certainly be remembered as a masterpiece, but we want to cite since it
accompanied for long years one of the authors’ youth. In this game
the main character, an American soldier fighting in Vietnam, finds himself
thrown by chance in the middle of the most famous battles of the past
(but also the future!) and he must survive long enough to “master
the flux” and get back to the present. Enemies are represented by
generic counters and move according to a few reaction rolls and a simple
set of easy rules that make them real “mindless automatons”.
Most of the times, anyway, the programming does non concern simulated
players (or “dummy players”, as they’re usually called)
or single counters, but the entire game system: in other words, the whole
“world” which the player must fight against. Obviously it
can’t be a complex system, and this is the reason why solitaire
wargaming has been traditionally confined to specific scenarios. A typical
characteristic is the presence of an asymmetrical situation, often heavily
slanted towards the “system”. In this way the player may play
the role of the hero and fight against impossibile odds, against an enemy
much more powerful, but so less clever... a good way to tickle the self-esteem
of potential customers! Moreover, usually the simulated players’
strategic choices are not as interesting as the human’s: the optimal
solution, in these cases, is simply to eliminate it and create a system
which allows the world to function and assures a random behavior (the
random element is always present, as die rolls, secret cards, counters
picked from an opaque cup and so on).
 The most
famous scenario for such games is probably the Battle of Britain, the
aerial campaign which, from July to October 1940, pitted over the English
Channel Goering’s Luftwaffe against RAF’s heroic pilots. There
are two well-known solitarie simulations of this battle: LONDON’S
BURNING (AH, 1995) and RAF (West End Games, 1986). In both cases the system
keeps the player busy with a constant stream of incoming bombing missions;
the player must lead the defense, that is absolutely incapable of going
face-to-face against a much superior enemy. The player must thus (but
we’re simplifying...) manage his resources (aircrafts, pilots etc.),
decide which objectives protect with priority and, most of all, decide
when to give battle.
Another scenario, which we want to cite because of the quality of the
game itself, is MOSBY’S RAIDERS from Victory Games. The player plays
the roles of Mosby, a great Confederate cavalry leader during the American
Civil War. Here, the “powerful but dumb” system is represented
by the Union war machine: at the head of his followers Mosby must operate
behind enemy lines and sabotage their communication, blow up bridges and
railroads, hitting without notice and even going as far as kidnapping
enemy generals. In short, a typical partisan guerrilla in a very original
setting, at least for an European gamer. A recommended title, that you
can find with relative ease on Ebay!
As far as paragraph-based systems go, “gamebook-like” so
to speak, we have already cited WEG’s TALES OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.
There are many more old titles, once again from SPI, which merge a textual
system with typical wargaming mechanics: the science-fiction VOYAGE OF
THE B.S.M. PANDORA (SPI, 1981), for example, at a “strategic level”
has a monthly temporal scale based on written paragraphs, with an added
turn-based tactical system taking place on several maps which represent
the surface of the many different planets.
The king of the numbered-paragraphs games, however, is surely AMBUSH!
(1983) from Victory Games, a super-tactical wargame set during WW2 which
merges paragraphs with the complexity of Squad Leader’s iperrealistic
rules, throwing in random events and a bunch of other stuff to boot! There’s
no need to say that, in order to even start playing, a gamer must dedicate
a huge number of nights (nights, not hours) to the tireless study of the
rules. That notwithstanding the game is considered a true classic, together
with its modules and the twin game BATTLE HYMN, set in the Pacific (VG,
1986).
Unfortunately we’re running out of space and we cannot talk at
length (as we would) about pure simulation systems, based on many complex
tables and a huge quantity of die rolls. It’s the case of B-17:
QUEEN OF THE SKIES (AH, 1983). These games consist mainly on a long sequence
of random events and are often criticized because they don’t let
the player make many meaningful choices: in fact that’s exactly
the point, since missions like those tackled by the “flying fortesses”
were often decided by chance and almost always the commander found himself
overrun by events. It’s a pity that nowadays sims like that have
been totally abandoned, mainly because of the computer’s diffusion.
The problem is that it would be a trivial task to implement a system like
B-17 on PC, but (besides a total lack of commercial interest) it would
lose completely its charm, since the long times of consultation of the
charts and the many die rolls convey a tension that an automatic computer
generation could not but destroy. In other words, the approach is almost
similar to a role-playing game: the commander leaves for his mission,
more often than not find himself in big trouble (the game is fiendishly
hard!) and can only watch the events unfold, hoping to save his own life
and that of his crew. And it’s hard to explain how fond one can
grow of his poor soldiers...
Well, we said there was no time to talk of B-17, and we ended up doing
it anyway. Now we’re really closing, but before that, we really
have to cite the most original solitaire system of them all: it’s
PELOPONNESIAN WAR (1991), once more from Victory Games. Here the system
is different from any other, since the player is required to take the
role of both nations at war! This way, instead of fighting against a dumb
system, he will always be able to say that his opponent is the toughest
one... himself. In short, the player will keep playing for the same side
as long as it’s losing, while the other is “auto-played”
by the system. As soon, with great effort, he will have managed to change
the fate of the war, he will be forced to swap sides and start commanding
the armies that, up to that instant, he was trying to wipe away! An original
idea, isn’t it? It’s obvious that such a game will appeal
to people that like to watch events unfold and experiment new strategies,
and not only “win”: in any case the game includes a way of
calculating victory points, based on the player’s actions and the
total duration of the war.
And Then There Will be One
So, now we’re really over. Maybe this long overview of solitaire
gaming has convinced you to try it... if you want to give it a shot, you
can find many titles in the great web site Game-it-Yourself! (http://www.runestoneit.com/~dseagraves),
an archive of “free” downloadable games, or you can print
ZOMBI NIGHTMARE right away, from the “To Play” section of
this very issue.
We are now leaving you alone... have fun!
|
|
