My dad, a retired engineer who operates a maple syrup farm in New Hampshire, rarely “comes down off the mountain” (as he puts it). When the occasion calls, he’s extremely hospitable and social with friends and family – but in his free time he prefers solitude and getting out in nature.
When it comes to my own leisure time, I swap my dad’s healthy outdoor lifestyle for sedentary gaming (which explains why the old man’s in better shape than me). But I did inherit his love of “alone time.” I play plenty of multiplayer games – MMOs, competitive shooters, you name it. That said, for many of the strategy, role-playing, and narrative-heavy games I prefer, solo play is what I prefer.
My preference for flying solo in games extends to tabletop games – and this is where I lose a lot of people. I have co-workers and friends who see nothing wrong with digging into a single-player video game for hundreds of hours, but the idea of setting up a solo board game is alien to them. Board games are meant to be played with buddies (and pizza, and possibly alcohol), right?
I love playing board games and tabletop RPGS with others. I can’t count the number of great hours my family’s spent playing D&D together, and I still have fond memories of cutthroat games of Settlers of Catan and Axis & Allies with former co-workers. But when I look around the mountain of board games on the shelves in my office, I see an awful lot of cooperative games – and most of them I’ve played as purely solo experiences.
Gloomhaven, Eldritch Horror, A Touch of Evil – if there’s a thematically-rich board game that can be played solo or co-op (with me running all the players), I probably own it. The one I’ve played the most is Shadows of Brimstone, a sprawling wild-west-meets-eldritch-horror game with a myriad of sometimes sloppily-balanced mechanics and a horde of miniatures (which I have slowly and badly painted over the years). I have countless hours invested in different groups of four Shadows of Brimstone heroes, chucking fistfuls of dice as they beat monsters, acquire loot and then promptly gamble away their earnings in the next randomly-generated town.
But Shadows of Brimstone and other similar cooperative board games require lots of setup and bookkeeping. First roll on a table to see what this town has for shops; then roll for random events; now collect these cardboard chits to track your inventory; now adjust all these stats for your characters; now set up the minis and cave tiles for the next combat. It’s a lot to manage, and when I play four characters solo in a game that’s made for a group of players, it quickly gets overwhelming and keeps me from the “fun part” – which, when I play games, is first and foremost the emergent stories well-designed systems create.
During the pandemic – when we were all overwhelmed by the events of the world – I found myself wanting a game that replicated the sheer creative and limitless joys of a good D&D session with friends, but that I could play on my own with minimal setup and less accounting work. Fortunately, there are game developers out there building great solo pen-and-paper experiences that focus on creativity, rather than mechanical crunch.
Telling Stories to Myself
The game I found that best scratched that itch was Ironsworn, the brilliant narrative RPG by Shawn Tomkin. Ironsworn’s mechanics are inspired by the Powered by the Apocalypse system, a framework for building narrative RPGs where mechanical character actions are based on lightweight moves that are driven strongly by the story and the player’s actions. Though Ironsworn works well as a cooperative or even GM-guided experience, one of its great differentiators is how it’s built from the ground up to be played as a solo game.
Ironsworn’s true brilliance is in how it unlocks a player’s creativity. A loose setting is defined by the game and a rough map provided – a dark low-fantasy world where mysteries lurk in forgotten forests and swamps – but the initial setup is as much about creating the world as it is about creating your character. Through a series of prompts and questions, the basic parameters are set – how did people come to this land? What is its history? Who are the major power players? The prompts are elegant and evocative, and immediately get the creative juices flowing, as hook ideas bubble up from your initial choices.
During gameplay, additional prompts keep the story going whenever a solo player runs out of ideas for the next beat. Ironsworn provides a solid series of charts, called oracles, and third-party developers have created tons more supplemental oracles for every situation. Whenever you’re not sure where your story goes next, it’s a chance to roll the dice and see. Whether you need to generate a new character in the story or figure out the villain’s next move, or just see what’s over the next hill, Ironsworn has an oracle table to help. The tables often give a very simple prompt – maybe one or two words – but it’s always been enough to unblock me as a solo player when I got stuck.
Over time, the initially blank, featureless map of the Ironlands fills in – villages, ruins, caves. More and more actors take the stage – sworn enemies, heroes, rulers, and peasants. Before you know it, you’ve created a whole world and a main character who’s surprised, delighted, and entertained you for hours – all without a GM guiding the experience.
Best of all, Ironsworn is lightweight and easy to set up. Compared to D&D or Shadows of Brimstone with its fistfuls of dice, the only requirements are a couple of D10s, a D6, a character sheet, and a single well-designed rulebook (with a couple of excellent supplements and asset cards if you want to add them to the experience). I can take the game on the road and set it up on a hotel desk, for a short session or a long one. If I have a laptop handy, Roll20.net has an excellent Ironsworn character sheet available, to further reduce the minimal bookkeeping.
I’ve lost myself in an Ironsworn game for weeks. There are several approaches to recording your character’s journeys, from lightweight to novelistic; since I enjoy writing I always tended toward longer-form journaling. For one particular character’s tale, an ex-assassin for a holy order, I wrote over 60,000 words – a full-on fantasy novel about his experiences – and I plan to pick up his unfinished tale again down the road.
Shawn Tomkin, the designer of Ironsworn, has since iterated on the system and created Starforged, a similar game with a science fiction setting. Though I’ve personally been more swept up by my time with Ironsworn, Starforged is equally brilliant, with slightly more polished mechanics and some excellent fresh thinking behind the move sets and character assets. That said, if neither sci-fi nor iron age dark fantasy appeals to you, the system is flexible enough to be easily adapted to almost any setting – an exercise left to the reader!
Historic Tales of Tragedy and Woe
If Ironsworn is an order of magnitude lighter-weight than Shadows of Brimstone, then the elegant Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings is another step down the complexity scale. Where Ironsworn needs at least three dice, Thousand Year Old Vampire’s minimal mechanics only require a single D10 and a single D6. Where Ironsworn is driven by tables of oracles, character assets, and move sets, Thousand Year Old Vampire is a single slim, beautiful volume of prompts. Where an Ironsworn game might stretch across multiple sessions over weeks or even months, a game of Thousand Year Old Vampire can be completed in a few hours.
I don’t want to spoil Thousand Year Old Vampire, though the title tells you a lot; it’s something that should be experienced, not fully described. I would not recommend it to anyone that’s uncomfortable going to dark places; a good session has a way of drawing things out of the corners of your psyche that can be genuinely disturbing, and the end of a story typically ranges from bittersweet to downright tragic. (The designer has done an excellent job providing appropriate trigger warnings in the game.) It also helps if you have a loose understanding of world history, so you can ground your vampire’s story in a starting time and place, but it’s not required.
Fair warning: while I can easily recommend Ironsworn as a great gateway for gamers looking to dip their toes in a solo-focused narrative experience, Thousand Year Old Vampire is not for everyone. It is technically a game and has gamelike elements, including dice rolls and resource management. But it’s not for players who care about “balance” or enjoy games for mechanical crunch and definitive answers.
What Thousand Year Old Vampire is perfect for is a stormy night by the fireplace, curled up with the book, spinning a yarn that you’ll want to tell your friends about. Or possibly, if you’re artistically talented, make an amazing comic about your vampire’s story.
Alone Time
I’ve always liked writing and creating content, but until a few years ago, I wouldn’t have expected narrative-focused, mechanically simplified solo-focused RPGs would be something I would enjoy. But the jump from the crunchy, sprawling Shadows of Brimstone to the unlimited creativity of Ironsworn and Thousand Year Old Vampire was much easier than I expected. The unexpected treat was how consistently surprising the games were to play – how the designs unlocked the most creative parts of my brain, generating unique experiences with all the plot twists of the best pen-and-paper gaming sessions with friends.
So the next time your friends are busy on game night, grab Ironsworn, Starforged, or Thousand Year Old Vampire. Pour yourself a glass of your favorite adult beverage, dim the lights (just a bit, so you can still read), and spin a tale. I promise you’ll travel to some very unexpected places.
Ironsworn’s core rules can be downloaded for free from the game’s main website here, but I strongly recommend the beautiful print edition and supplements. Thousand Year Old Vampire is available on the creator’s website – and trust me when I say you DEFINITELY want the gorgeous print edition.