Solo modes are apparently everywhere now, automas and bot decks bundled into games that never used to need them, and every review I read treats this as an unambiguous good, more ways to play the game you already own, what’s not to like. I own at least three games with a real, well designed solo option sitting right there in the box, and I have played every single one of them exactly zero times by myself, and I’ve finally stopped feeling vaguely guilty about that and started actually working out why.

It’s not that I don’t understand the appeal. I get it, genuinely, some nights nobody’s available, or you just want to sit with a game’s mechanics without the social overhead of teaching or negotiating with another human, and a good automa scratches that itch for a lot of people I respect. But for me a board game isn’t really a puzzle I’m solving against the game’s own logic, it’s a specific kind of shared attention, and stripping the other people out doesn’t leave me with a smaller version of the same experience, it leaves me with something that’s barely related to what I actually go to games for in the first place. I don’t want to optimize against a deck of cards pretending to be a person. I want to watch Marcus make a terrible alliance and then narrate his own betrayal five minutes later. That’s the actual product, for me, not the scoring track underneath it.

I think there’s also something a little bit true in the accusation that solo play is closer to reading than to gaming, in the specific sense that matters to me, and I say that as someone who clearly loves reading. A book is built for one person’s attention. A game, or at least the kind I actually reach for, is built for the friction between multiple people’s decisions, the part where you can’t fully predict what’s about to happen because someone else in the room is about to do something you didn’t account for. Remove the other people and you’ve removed the one ingredient I was actually there for. The automa can be a genuinely clever piece of design, and I’ve heard enough good things about a few specific ones that I believe they’re well made. I just don’t think well made is the same question as “does this give me what I wanted.”

So my three boxes with their solo inserts sit there, technically more versatile than the games without them, and I will probably never open that particular section of any of their rulebooks. I don’t think that’s a knock on the people who do use them, some of my own group members play solo between our sessions specifically to learn a game before teaching it to the rest of us, which I actually appreciate. It’s just not a version of this hobby I’m interested in for myself, and I’ve stopped apologizing for that whenever it comes up, the way I used to when I felt like not using a feature I paid for made me somehow ungrateful for it.