Welcome to “Board with Myself,” a feature in which I talk about solo board games and board games with solo modes. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of friends. Sometimes you don’t have many friends at all. That’s when you have to be board with yourself.
I love a board game with a simple name.
What is this game? Space Park.
Where does it take place? Parks in Space.
Great.
You play explorers visiting already-named planets in a quest for science! Or something along those lines. Basically, you jump around the board to collect resources to spend on experience points and special ability cards that also give you experience points. The person at the end of the game with the most experience points wins.
Except we’re playing solo, so there’s extra rules: An automated robot runs down a deck that decides when the game ends. If you get 20 experience points before that, you win. If you don’t, you lose. You die in space. Alien civilizations years in the future find your corpse and wonder what it was doing here and if it was sad dying so alone.
Space Park is actually a pretty great solo game. One, the extra rules don’t suck. So many board games that have a tacked-on solo mode include a dozen additional fucking rules like, “When rolling the dice, roll an extra dice outside those dice and subtract that number from the previous turn’s dice roll to decid
e how many spaces you can roll for.” This is just, like, one extra rule that tracks and makes sense.
The games also run pretty fast. Another pitfall of solo modes is playing ninety minutes of a half-fun game, only to realize that you’ve been doing it wrong the whole time. Space Park finishes up in 15-30 minutes, especially with just one person doing the exploring out there in the depths of space.
Perhaps what I like about Space Park’s solo mode is that the design of the cards and pace of the game allow for some fun head canon storytelling. In my solo game, I was being stalked by a rogue mining robot that was programmed to prevent me from getting home. I failed to get home like five or six times.
It’s not the deepest game in the world, but it’s quick and pretty and gets the job done.
Space Park!