Solo gaming

[Chaoswolf]

Any good rule sets out there for playing miniatures games solo? Games that can be played with others or by oneself count as well.

[Doug Sundseth]

Frostgrave has a solo campaign. It's limited, but adequate, at least once or twice.

 

Rangers of Shadowdeep is designed as a coop/solo game, so as far as I know, all the scenarios can be played solo.

[Chaoswolf]

I knew about and have played Frostgrave, although with other people.

Do you have any experience with Rangers of Shadowdeep?

[Glitterwolf]

Warhammer Quest

Runebound

Magic Realm

Advanced Heroquest.

 

You can find lots of tiles/adventures/ rulebooks etc online for the older WH Quest and Advanced Heroquest.

Might be of help till you can get your hands on the real thing.

[MoebiusStrip]

1 hour ago, Chaoswolf said:

Do you have any experience with Rangers of Shadowdeep?

It's great fun, and also good coop. There is some limited replayability because you don't experience everything in one playthrough. But the scenarios are based on a story and not generic so a second playthrough you still know most of what can happen.

 

Some other, more generic thing I know of are:

Ganesha Games: Sellswords and Spellslingers and  Four Against Darkness.

S&S seems to be abandoned in favour of 4AD.

 

Nordic Weasel: Five Leagues From the Borderlands (Fantasy) and Five Parces from Home (Sci-Fi).

 

These laters ones I have skimmed through but not played, they have a kind of freeform campaign so offer greater replayability.

 

Mantic Games: Deadzone has a solo variant with Zombies in the outbreak extension.

 

Other good resources for randomizing stuff and providing scenario 'story' ideas are: are gm replacement stuff, adventure generators and so on.  There are a lot of these, e.g., The Solo Wargaming Guide (William Silvester) or Ultimate Toolbox (Ibach,Ibach and Pinto / AEG) or even the Dungeons and Dragon DM Guide (Wizards of the Coast). All of these contain tables to randomly generate terrain, weather, and other assorted stuff.

Edited June 22, 2019 by MoebiusStrip
Sentences I write sometimes are hard to parse

[Doug Sundseth]

2 hours ago, Chaoswolf said:

I knew about and have played Frostgrave, although with other people.

Do you have any experience with Rangers of Shadowdeep?

 

I haven't had the chance to play it myself. (Kind of like all those unpainted minis that I bought because I really wanted to paint them.)

 

But Guerrilla Miniature Games has a YouTube series on the game:

 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzrPO7KIAtwUd1ckA7J80fMAVTtpZoWrw

 

The mechanics are pretty similar to Frostgrave/Ghost Archipelago, though it's more "same family" than "same game".

[Zink]

4 hours ago, Chaoswolf said:

I knew about and have played Frostgrave, although with other people.

Do you have any experience with Rangers of Shadowdeep?

 

We've played all the published scenarios and are designing our own now plus I've downloaded a bunch of player made scenarios from the facebook group. It's the most popular game for us right now. Ticking all the boxes for light RPG mostly tabletop game. If you like the basic Frostgrave game mechanics you'd probably like ROSD. It just adds experience gain for everyone and various skills for specific situations. Most of the scenarios can be replayed as is or tweaked a bit. A few have a puzzle element that isn't totally random so once you solve it the fun of a replay might be less. The large Burning Light mission is like that. I've been trying to think up a way to change/randomise  the final location the heroes are searching for for if we design something like that. The link Doug gave is very good for seeing how it plays plus he has videos of a ton of other games. Can be a major time sink if you like watching other people play games.

 

I have the Nordic WEasel games that Moebius Strip mentioned too. I bought them at the same time as ROSD but haven't played them. The switch from Frostgrave to ROSD was easier and it kept us busy most of the winter. I do want to take some of the things from 5 Leagues to make random games for ROSD. They're pretty similar in style and scale. Roughly 8 heroes fighting a number of bad guys. The biggest difference is that in ROSD the battles are already designed with a little bit of random elements for what will happen. In 5 Leagues everything is randomly determined (number and type of enemies), things can happen between battles (random encounters if travelling) and there is no over all story other than clearing an area of all the bad guys. Really want to insert Frostgrave/ROSD creatures and items into the 5 Leagues tables and try a small campaign.

 

Also read recently that there's another Frostgrave supplement coming this fall with more of a focus on Solo/coop play.

[Chaoswolf]

1 hour ago, Zink said:

Also read recently that there's another Frostgrave supplement coming this fall with more of a focus on Solo/coop play.

I've heard some rumors about that, too. Off to go do some digging!

[cawatrooper]

You could use the Descent App and swap out some of the minis it comes with.

[Zink]

Just got an email that Five Leagues from the Borderlands has a second edition available. Sounds like he added a lot of stuff to it. I'll be buying it some time to check out. You can read about it and other Nordic Weasel games here.

http://fivemennormandy.blogspot.com/

[Mehman]

Two Hour Wargames. Period.

 

You want Fantasy? Maybe some Sci-Fi? Want to play massed-battle games? They have it all.

[Balgin Stondraeg]

On 6/22/2019 at 1:15 PM, Glitterwolf said:

Advanced Heroquest.

 

You can find lots of tiles/adventures/ rulebooks etc online for the older WH Quest and Advanced Heroquest.

Might be of help till you can get your hands on the real thing.

 

Advanced Heroquest is really good, by the way.

 

I should also add Darklight: Memento Mori (a very Warhammer Quest inspired game that wears it's inspiration on it's sleeve right next to some heavy Dark Souls inspiration as well). Just be careful with the rule for it costing a movement point to open or close a door. It wasn't in the first printing of the rulebook but was included in a 1 or 2 page errata document that was included in the game box.

[lowlylowlycook]

A lot of people do historical wargames solo.  My impression is that games that have some kind of mechanics that introduce friction or randomness work better.  Basically you don't want to be playing chess against yourself.

 

The Men Who Would be Kings by Daniel Mersey is a colonial period wargame that has solo rules in the form of a letter of instruction from a gaming buddy that cant make it that night.  They could easily be adapted to hordes of orcs instead of Zulus. 

[Chrome]

These aren't wargames, but they do have miniatures - FFG's Descent has an app that has several free campaigns available for it. You control the heroes and the app controls everything else. It gives you a story, tells you which tiles to lay down as you explore, controls the monsters, awards XP, and controls what's available to purchase in town. I've played a couple of the campaigns and they're pretty fun, but a few of them do require the purchase of specific Descent expansions so you have access to the tiles and monsters used in the campaign.

 

There's also a version of the app for Imperial Assault if you're a Star Wars fan. I haven't played that one tho so I can't say how good/bad the campaigns are.

[Froggy the Great]

I have played and highly recommend:

--Sellswords & Spellslingers:  Card-driven events, D20+modifiers, has automated the Killer GM Zerg rush.

--Rangers of Shadow Deep:  Solo Frostgrave without the frost, done exceedingly well.  Tough and heroic.  D20 based.

--Five Leagues from the Borderlands:  Harsh, gritty, The Black Company out on patrol, minimal sorcery.  Lots of charts, lots of options, D100/D20 based charts, D6 based gameplay.  This one is currently my favorite and the author responds quickly to questions on Wargamevault.