Nearly every heavier game I own now comes with a solo variant bolted on, an automa deck, a bot with its own little flowchart of behavior, sometimes an entire companion app dedicated to simulating an opponent, and I understand exactly why publishers do it, more of the box gets used, more people who can’t always find a second player still get a reason to buy in. I just don’t use any of it, on principle mostly, and I’m aware that makes me a slightly annoying person to have this opinion around, since half my friends genuinely love their solo modes and I’m not trying to talk anyone out of theirs.

For me the entire pleasure of a game is the specific unpredictability of a person across the table who wants something different than the system wants, who bluffs badly or well, who remembers a grudge from three turns ago and plays around it out of spite rather than optimization. An automa deck flips cards in a pattern. It’s a genuinely clever design problem, dressing probability up as an opponent with something like a personality, and I don’t want to undersell how much engineering goes into a good one. But it isn’t spite. It doesn’t remember Thanksgiving. Playing Terraforming Mars against a deck of cards feels to me like doing a crossword with the answers half-visible, technically an activity, not the thing I actually came for.

Callum thinks this is me being precious about it, and he’s probably a little right, there’s a copyeditor-brain purism underneath this that wants the “real” version of an experience even when the substitute version is genuinely well made. I catch myself doing the same thing with audiobooks versus print sometimes, insisting on a distinction that mostly exists in my head. But unlike the audiobook thing, which I’ve mostly let go of, this one I’m sticking with. A shelf full of unopened solo rulebooks doesn’t bother me the way an unread book does, because I’m not actually missing anything I wanted, I just wanted the other thing, the person, the whole time.

So if you catch me passing on a great-looking solo campaign, it’s not that I doubt it’s good. It’s that the entire reason I sit down to a game most nights is Callum sitting down across from me doing something I didn’t see coming, and no automa deck, however clever, is built to do that on purpose.