Playing with yourself offline

Thorgi assembled.

I wish there was a more elegant way to talk about gaming in more specific ways. Console, PC, tabletop. While console and PC are perfectly fine most of the time, saying tabletop gaming is still pretty vague. Some people think of RPGs (which has to be specified as tabletop RPGs, otherwise many people just think Final Fantasy or WoW), and beyond that there's board games, card games, and social games that use neither boards nor cards (which really don't have a specific name for their category in my mind).

-tangent below-

Break that down even further, and you have Dixit which is a 'board game', but not what people think of. It's not Risk or Monopoly, which is traditionally what I think of when I hear 'board game'. Dixit, for those who haven't played it is sort of an art game mixed with a mind game. The tl;dr version is that you try to get people to guess the card art you played secretly without being blatant or explicit. The more people who guess right the better. Unless everyone guessed right, then you lose points. So the trick is to try and get a few people on the right track but be vague enough that not everyone will. Oh, the other part is that everyone else also secretly plays a card they think can match your description to try to get votes to gain themselves some points. Everyone votes on which one they think is yours (nobody can vote on their own and you don't vote). It sounds kind of convoluted when written out and not seeing the cards laid out, but it makes sense. Anyways, it uses cards and a board but I'd hardly consider it a board game. 

What about games that use tiles? Betrayal at the House on the Hill uses tiles to design a house. Do I count that as a board game? It uses cards too but those are really just a small component of the game. What games that use game pieces and props? Are those board games? The point is that the vernacular that most people use when talking about board/card/tabletop gaming is really vague at times. Board Game Geek has lots of categories, too many to list. I don't really have dexterity games in the same category as a game like Fluxx or Monopoly. I wish I had an answer for this but I don't. I hope to think up of something and use it on this blog hoping it gets popular.

Tangent aside, I wanted to talk about single player offline table top games. They're rare and I don't really know of any off the top of my head except if they are part of a multiplayer game like Arkham Horror. There was a contest on BGG that ended recently but I was unable to finish my game in time for that contest. Still, I think it's a really interesting untapped market. Most single player games can easily be turned into multiplayer games but not the other way around. Many multiplayer games depend on other players to be functional

Single player board/card games seem kind of forever aloneish, yet in video games single player games are perfectly normal. Part of the reason is because there's a set of rules you have to follow in video games and a narrative that can drive you. In a board/card game, the rules are there but you have to enforce them yourself. It's busy work that really gets in the way of the playing. The busywork that can be found in a lot of board games and card games can be mitigated with friends to help handle the pieces and remember the rules. If it's just you by yourself, it's a lot less fun I think. A big part of making a single player board game work would to keep it from becoming unfun by cluttering it with rules and objects. A single player game of Pandemic works but is a lot less fun. The game is pretty elegantly designed and has a minimum of components to manage. Arkham Horror on the other hand has a hundred moving parts that becomes a real pain to manage if you play by yourself (which I have done, and it is a big hassle). 

I should probably revisit this at a later time when I actually have the time to make edits rather than just a stream of consciousness spewed onto the screen.