My own top 10 of solitaire tabletop games…
1. Arkham Horror LCG Just very well executed on narrative and I honestly do really like the random number generator that isn’t dice, but instead pulling the numbers out of a bag.
2. Apocrypha Another game where I’m just a huge fan of the narrative and theme, but this time there are a bunch of interesting game mechanics going on, too! I do wish that the character progression was a little more dramatic, but with that said…I do feel like my team of Saints is advancing, even just in Candlepoint, without any enduring fragments just yet.
3. PACG: The Mummy’s Mask Of all the games that use – or were inspired by – the PACG system, this is the one that for me hits the sweetest spot of game mechanics and and satisfying character leveling.
4. Eldritch Horror Yes, yes, I know all about the sprawl of rules and new mechanics and cards and everything else. But…I can’t quit you game. At some point I decided that I absolutely enjoyed the Indiana Jonesing of the Cthulhu universe WAY more than the actual canon Cthulhu universe, and started playing this game campaign-style as a sort of open-world board game. And for me, played like that, it works. (It also helps massively to have an aftermarket EH organizer to make setting up games and even playing them go at a snappy pace.)
5. Elder Sign Yeah, shoot me: it’s another FFG sprawling Cthulhu thing. I’d played this on iPad and found it enjoyably amusing enough, then set it aside. I couldn’t imagine having an entire game system like this. And then…along comes the third ES expansion, Gates of Arkham, and everything gets way more interesting, and the almost non-existent narrative comes floating to the surface. Plus…I love chucking dice, if I’m being honest. And this game lets me chuck dice like crazy.
6. Darkest Night (2nd Ed.) This is still a fun one to dig out, set up quickly and then draw 3 or 4 random heroes and see if I can beat the big bad Necromancer with what is usually an unbalanced party of adventurers.
7. 7th Continent There are criticisms that are on the money, and fully acknowledged. With that said, so much of this game – from the way the cards interplay with one another, to the twisty narratives (that are probably only twisty the first time you see them) – I still unreservedly love. It’s essentially a solitaire, card-driven tabletop point and click adventure game. For lots of folks, that may sound horrific. For this folk, that sounds kind of awesome.
8. Robinson Crusoe (3rd Ed.) I sold my copy of RC 2nd edition at a gaming auction, having tried to play it exactly once and feeling bewildered. The 3rd edition fixes a lot of problems with the original rulebook and makes for a mechanically-driven euro thing that manages to retain a lot of the flavor of its theme. Knocked down a few spots for releasing an intriguing expansion that has conflicting, confounding, and otherwise indecipherable rules.
9. Nemo’s War (2nd Ed.) Love the theme. Love, love, love the theme. In fact, I’d say that 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is an IP that’s been begging for some great games, and here it got a pretty good one. If there’s a knock I have on it, it’s that what I wanted to be a big part of the gameplay – ship-to-Nautilus combat – is barely part of the gameplay at all. Assess modifiers, roll a d6, ship sinks or it doesn’t. To be fair, the game systems do their thing and are part of a taut design that was never meant to incorporate that.
10. Mansions of Madness (2nd ed.) The idea of an app-driven boardgame is phenomenally attractive to me: You could, conceivably use a tiles and cards and dice system refereed by an app to do some incredible things. Unfortunately, for now I think this system is better at concept than execution, but I’ve still been engaged by this system in this limited scope.