J'ai une âme solitaire: Solitaire Boardgaming Megathread!

Do you mean the actual “basic game” from the rules supplement, with the generic action cards? Unless you’ve never played a deck-builder before, I wouldn’t bother. The charm of Dungeon Alliance is how each character’s starting cards work together as a foundation for your deck, which you then build on, using the short time you have. If the bulk of your deck is those generic cards, you’re going to miss out on what gives each character, well, character.

It really is quite the brain melter, though. And, yikes, what a table hog!

-Tom

Ugh so that’s 32 cards in the box that no-one will actually use? :P

Yep…wont use any of those 32…already put them into permanent ziplock.

I meant basic by not using quests as that is the actual goal event in the solo game unless you want to just try and get a high score without them…which is what I am doing in my first game. That is going on and on and on.

I’ve put the monster tokens in a plano type container and only pull out the cards once I place the monsters. Had them all out originally but it’s just too much.

You’ll actually learn the monster quickly enough and won’t need the cards. In fact, a handy cheat sheet or some quick notes will do just fine.

-Tom

Played solo games of Dungeon Alliance and Hexplore It over the weekend.

Dungeon Alliance is a keeper. I had a blast with it. I dove straight in and played the full game with quests and it’s surprisingly intuitive for a Mage Knight player. That’s because this is pretty much a streamlined version of that game.

I was a little worried going in because most of the cards are just +1 this or +2 that, without much intricacy to them. But like Mage Knight, it’s less about the card you play as it is about managing what you have. Even disacarding is an agonizing choice as you may not need a card this round, but you can’t stop thinking about how great it would be for the next one.

Everything just works in this one. I will say that for solo play, the quests are a necessity. Otherwise it’s just a beat your high score game, and I’m not a fan of that.

Hexplore It I’m still not sure about. It has some great ideas, and there’s plenty of depth to be had. But it also seems kind of simplistic at the same time. Power ups just give you generic bonuses and gear is non existent in many ways (you just get to increase the value of your various stats without any associated real world reasoning to it).

Still, there’s a ton of content so I may need to just give it more time. I will say that it reminds me of Shadows of Malice in many ways. I kind of wanted to break that out after an hour with Hexplore It.

Word of warning to those interested in Hexplore It. My cards and boards are warping heavily after 24 hours outside the box. The stuff can most likely be flattened out again by putting them back in the box and placing something heavy on it to increase the pressure. But I haven’t seen this level of warping in game components since Space Hulk 3rd edition.

I just downloaded all the files for Doctor Who. At the moment I’m a bit confused by all the material. How much of it do you have to print out?
I’d like to play it but I’m a bit intimidated by all this stuff.

Try this.
https://boardgamegeek.com/file/download/wep5vxgjc5/beginners_guide.pdf

You can play on your ipad switching between PDFS (or your desktop). I recommend reading the rules, but the books you will most use are Adventure, and events, and rules till you get used to the game. . I also recommend printing out the Aids sheet that list all the actions you can take and the roll charts. It makes it soooo much easier to jump in and play. Once you played a few times, if you like it, you’ll want to print out the books and folder them (if you are anything like me lol).

Game play basically you have 12 turns to solve the adventure.

  • You start with the adventure book, Adventure prologue (its a easier adventure). Roll a dice for which adventure, This tells you what your potential enemies, characters you can/befriend, Event types, plots and locations you can visit.

  • Turn 0 you roll for first encounter, if you have n encounter roll again to determine if its event, enemy, character or location. (Their is a enemy book, and for everything else the event book)

  • On turn 1 You can potentially take a slew of actions, Relax, explore, Investigate, Seek information, Plan, Research, Seek help, to name a few. Take 1 resolve it (usually be referring to a table or a event or a enemy may be encountered)

  • End of turn you roll for another encounter and resolve

Do this for a total of 12 turns and either solve the adventure, or fail it and face the consequences. If you win, you gain Luck (which you use to gain new allies, raise a stat, gain a skill, or roll for new equipment- I really need my sonic screw driver).

Game Goal: In the 12 turns the goal of the game is to find out who is the enemy, then discover their goal, their goal will determine how many DM you need to gather to have a option to defeat the enemy (the enemy will list the oppose options from sabotage, to outwit, to foil their doomsday to play, to outright combat. The enemy you are facing can potentially make the DM you need to gather less. Facing Daleks has a modified of 0, while facing Cassandra (I think is +3). So if the goal has a DM of 7 and you are facing Cassandra who give you +3 you only need to gather 4 DM! An easy adventure (maybe).

As you explore, you will find allies, you will sometimes get separated from them, they sometimes even get captured, run into a big group of enemies and decide to fight or RUN!, or you can event run across UNIT soldiers who, if you outwit them, will join you. You can convert allies into companions.

What makes this game so fun, is that the experience for each adventure is often NOTHING like the previous one.

in one adventure I encountered the Mondasians (specifically the hospital orderlies), who are trying to convert themselves into the cybermen. However since my Companion got separated from me (happens on doubles, rolling doubles is bad!), they ignored me since I had no humans with me. I now knew my enemy and decided to follow them to find out their goal, hoping my companion would get a little lucky on her and find her way back to me. She got captured sadly, but on the plus side she met in a ally in prison who had important information on the goal and gave us plus 1DM. Ok…after finding out Mondasians goal the next turn I went about rescuing my companion and her new ally. The game is full of unique and narrative moments like this!

Hope these summaries gave you a brief overview of how the game is played to make it a little easier to jump into. A few youtube videos exist as well, showing play.

Let me know if you have other questions :)

There is also a sample gameplay in the rulebook (i think its the rulebook, i am at work now).
Plus bgg should have some samples also.

it seems confusing at first but as David2 mentioned the cheat sheet can tell you what you can do. That is the one thing i printed out (plus the sample play).

Ugh seems I’ve caught this ‘custom foamboard insert fever’ that’s going around. I got my copy of Dungeon Alliance but apparently organising it was more important than actually playing it (as people in the Gloomhaven thread can attest to)! :)

Was a fun little project.

Hope no-one minds if I post a bunch of pics...

Base insert with the cards and dividers in:

Two ‘bit trays’, for the various gameplay counters and such:

One monster/challenge/health tray, all sorted by XP/level:

One (rather rough) tray for sundry player bits. Left space to fit in the board border tiles (on the left edge in the pic):

Putting it all together. Two bit trays stacked in middle, token tray at front, map tiles split into two stacks:

And the rest! Rulebooks fit nicely on top:

I’ll possibly change that sundry bits tray and remove the space for the border tiles, to make it a bit bigger. I think those border tiles could stack in the corners easily enough.

Very nice, Andrew. I clicked on your pictures tag thinking, “Well, how much can you do with Dungeon Alliance, which is really just a matter of sorting a bunch of cards…” But that’s pretty nifty, after all. Seems the biggest hurdle, complication-wise, to starting a new game is finding the round hero tokens for the heroes you’re using. It’s really nice how you’ve neatly tucked the frame corners between inserts.

Some of the minis have fairly frail limbs and weapons and such. Are you concerned about keeping them in a baggie? I’ve kept mine in the plastic bubble insert in the boxes they came in, but it adds an ungainly amount of storage space.

-Tom

Cheers! The main aim was to be able ‘play out of the box’, with all the often-used bits ready to go. Also having the monsters/challenges easily locatable in the tray means I wouldn’t have to lay them all out first either, or dig through unsorted piles.

Of course it would add a bit of clean-up time instead, since I’d have to sort them back into the tray rather than just dump them into a bag (or maybe I could return monsters to the tray after the’re defeated if the rules allow).

Yeah I made a new version of that tray, bigger with two compartments to make finding those tokens easier. But it does lose the nice frame tuck!

Revision pics

Well, I wasn’t concerned… but now that you mention it… ;)
Actually they seemed like pretty solid plastic to me, and if they were painted maybe I’d have tried engineer something better for them. I didn’t really want them in a seperate box.

I had actually considering bagging up those player tokens and making the front tray for the minis but they didn’t really fit.

My philosophy is that a longer clean-up is always preferable if it means a shorter set-up. I’d rather take ten extra minutes putting a game away even if it just means five fewer minutes setting it up. For me, the priority is always on getting into the game with the least fuss possible. Especially when other people are involved. So, yeah, totally sort those encounters and monsters! I’m pretty OCD when it comes to putting cards away when you might have to fish out a particular card. Everything gets put in alphabetical order, dammit. Except Dungeon Alliance’s monsters go by level, then alphabetical order.

Actually, I find the cards kind of superfluous. I’m not sure how attached you are to the artwork, but since all of a monster’s stats are on the token, with a helpful asterisk indicating its special ability, I’ve just been using a cheat sheet and leaving the cards in the box. I find that Dungeon Alliance is quite the table hog and it helps save space not having to mess around in a spread of cards to remind myself of, say, what a goblin or ogre or spider does.

As for the minis, I don’t have a lot of experience with minis and how durable they are. One of my favorite games, Clockwork Wars, has a few pre-painted minis. One of them is a Steam Tank, which is a really bad-ass land unit that pretty much terrorizes the board. However, at some point, the mini’s main gun, and antennas, and side guns warped and got all droopy. Now everything points down towards the ground. It makes for a far less terrifying show.

But, you’re right that the Dungeon Alliance minis seem pretty solid. I’ll probably end up piling them into the box as well. I think there’s only like a bow and a couple of swords that I’d be worried about.

You have any favorite characters yet?

-Tom

Oh yeah I absolutely share that philosophy, setup time is a big demotivator for me getting a game going, and a big reason I gave building these inserts a go (this is my 2nd, I did one for Mage Knight recently too).

That’s me to a tee, OCD. I actually sorted them by level then by token count as I figured the higher counts would come out more often. But thinking about it now alphabetical makes more sense.

For the monster cards I was considering just laying them out in a couple of those 3x3 A4 sleeve things used for archiving trading cards, so you have up to 9 on a page. 18 if you fit 2 per pocket, 9 front 9 back. Then I can just pull out a page to check them when needed. I’ll probably just use a cheat sheet like you do after a few games.

Shamefully I haven’t actually played the game yet! It only just arrived.

And used to be I’d unbox the game, read the rules, punch counters, figure out the bagging. Then play. Now it seems there’s another step - build insert. I’m sure it’s a phase. :P

Pretty keen though, I’m going to play tomorrow.

Anyone? New on KS today, made for solo, already funded:

I had a quick look and I’m not sure. It looks like you’re mainly moving numbers around on a tracking sheet.

Are we all not just moving numbers around the tracking sheet of life?

I think that’s the tradeoff for having a game that plays so quickly. Mechanics win out over flavor and “stuff.”

I saw that too and watched a few vids and decided against it.

I have enough short solo type games.

I did kickstart Duelsaur under the Dinosaur Island kickstarter. They say there are 6 or 7 AI’s with differing strategies so we’ll see how that works out…pretty inexpensive.

Still awaiting 7th Continent and Street Masters.

These plastic sleeve sheets are a great time-saver for games with lots of reference cards! All of Dungeon Aliiance’s cards fit on 2 sheets:

I played my second game of Dungeon Alliance today. It was my first ‘real’ game, as the 1st game was the short 2-round level-1 version (though I was using the proper hero cards).

It didn’t go so well. It was an entertaining few hours but shamefully I didn’t complete any quests nor score any real points. :)

Man, you really get punished for not exploring (-4 per unplaced tile)! So that was my main lesson - I should be pushing real hard to explore as much as I can. I played way too conservatively, and need to be opening multiple doors per round I think.

Since pretty much only the strongest monster attacks each turn, having lots of chaff out doesn’t seem that dangerous. Except it bogs down your movement and stops you revealing those Challenge tokens or opening anything locked or secret I guess. Oh I guess having higher-XP enemies unable to reach any targets can be bad too.

I did manage to have a crack at the 7XP quest, which was the Goblin King. That was pretty cool - having the standard monster activation and then this motherlover spawning goblin hordes with all their free +1 attacks was pretty insane. Then he did ‘phalanx’, where any adjacent Goblins shielded him from attack. Ugh that was it for me, I was on my last activation. Retreat!

I only had 1 casualty and got him down to half health, but all activating him really achieved was spawning -6 more points for me. ;)

So yeah I really liked it. The system is quite intuitive and straight-forward yet the level of thinking involved is quite deep. I love that the solo AI deck heavily involves player decisions too.