A Valentine’s Day Survival Guide
February 14th is the day of love, an oath to some, but loathed by many.
There are endless lists of activities on the internet curated to those who wish to spend the day with their significant other, from dinner and drinks to picnics and beaches. All that remains for those on the other unfortunate end of the relationship spectrum is a day of anguish and despair.
Presenting the solution to all single board gamers out there that need a simple distraction from their woes – Monopoly Solitaire, a fanmade solitaire version crafted by Stephen Rogers. Monopoly is a household staple, one of the few board games that have maintained its renown even to those uninitiated to the gaming community. It’s famous for its long dreary rounds that seem to last forever, with an economy proficient in forging fleeting partnerships and destroying even the strongest of relationships. There may be no other better board game to enjoy on Valentine’s. By playing against yourself in this intense mode of Monopoly, there can only be one real winner on Valentine’s Day – you.
Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash
Imagine this, on a cold Valentine’s day night, the stars come out dancing in perfect constellations, shining down on flocks of couples. As the tide comes in, love floods onto the shores as lovers crowd onto sandy beaches. And there’s you, hunched over a board game, saccharine wine in one hand, shuffling between plastic chairs around the board as you manually input the moves of your invisible opponents.
Objectively, it sounds like a terrible time.
The argument for why many choose not to play solitaire games is that it’s simply too boring to play alone. There’s no appeal in participating in a system where competition is absent and the joys of the many ‘HA! IN YOUR FACE!’ are erased. There’s usually an expectation that board games are a social activity, which holds back many from diving into the hobby. But the appeal of solitaire games lies in the idea that you still can have fun alone.
What makes solitaire games fun and engaging is that you are your own challenge – you craft the different levels of difficulty to make your experience more enjoyable. For Roger’s Monopoly Solitaire, his new set of rules reinvent the monopoly experience, turning it from a dull family game where you attempt to constantly one-up your opponent, to a race to overcome the stringent rules that render you constantly at the risk of bankruptcy.
Usual Monopoly rules dictate that you have a choice to either buy the property you land on or leave it for the next player. However, in Roger’s solo mode, once you decide to not buy the property you have landed on, it automatically gets bought up by the bank. The bank acts as the automated player whose property becomes a prevailing penalty as you explore the board. Therefore, this changes the goal for Monopoly from bankrupting your foes to keeping yourself from being bankrupt.
This forces you to then manage your resources and choose which estate you should buy to best tailor your odds of profit. The ability to reinvent rules and craft new challenges allows for players to constantly look for new strategies to play their favourite board game, without the hassle of having to sort through multiple schedules and put time aside for a group game.
The solo board gaming experience can be an effective means of indulging in a narrative as well. Kate Roesch and Steve Walsh’s ‘The Estate of Baron Archambaud, An Ingrate’ (TEBA) is a solo card game experience aimed at exploring a narrative world crafted by the duo, taking inspiration from the Choose Your Own Adventure genre and blending it into the medium of tile laying card games.
In TEBA, you start the game by choosing from a repertoire of characters, each attempting to locate a unique heirloom lost to the Baron: the Socialite, Musketeer, Illusionist, Dandy, Collector, and Poet. Each character holds varying stats that affect the strategies you can take on each run. The narrative of the game immerses the player in a twisted world, where the player embodies a character who attempts to steal a lost heirloom from a Victorian mansion full of winding hallways, reminiscent of the Winchester Mystery House.
The bulk of the gameplay comes from the player’s interaction with the story, either through solving the puzzles in each room or investigating the larger mystery of Archambaud’s death. The ability to invoke different characters in each run allows for the player to craft their own playstyle for the rest of the game, and for future runs as well. This single player experience then allows for an incredibly detailed and tailored experience for the player, where every mechanic and every story beat can be enjoyed at their own leisure and be fully immersed.
TEBA cleverly utilises cards to outline the disorientating layout of the Baron’s mansion, playing into the narrative of a mansion with hallways that shift and twist with every playthrough.
The mansion is built out of 26 cards shuffled into a 5x5 grid, with the outer layer of cards as the outer chambers, with easier puzzles and foes, and the inner chambers with harder foes and the vault itself. You travel through the mansion by flipping cards, each representing a room in the mansion, in hopes of finding the vault where the lost heirloom lies. As you traverse each room, you unlock a whole slew of characters and more of the storyline. You then have three choices: to attack, charm or escape. However, it may not be wise to simply rush to the inner chambers as the clues to unlocking the vault may lie elsewhere.
Puzzles are littered throughout the rooms, allowing for the player’s actions to go beyond the simple roll of a dice and a mutter of a prayer. The individual puzzles add towards unlocking the vault and attaining the final treasure. This additional detail incentivises players to explore the outer layers before finally traversing into the inner chambers, in hopes of finding more clues for the final puzzle. Of course, with this system in check, this means that the game can only be replayed until the final solution is found. However, this allows you to spend Valentine’s day in your own imaginative world, where you can dive into a rich narrative with zero distractions. Solo board games may not sound like such a terrible idea after all.
As the tides begin to subside, taking with them all the red roses and deflated balloons, there comes another yearly realisation that Valentine’s Day wasn’t the worst day to live through as a person without a significant other. This Valentine’s Day, come hunker down with us as we prowl through the endless collections of solo board games, and the potential fantastical universes that greet us at the end of it.
