Operation: Game Night

OGN Ep 16: Riding Solo - Solo Game Spectacular!

• Travis, Clay, & Jared • Season 1 • Episode 16

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While Clay and Jared grab some well-deserved R&R, Travis recounts some solo games he wants to get played! It's a shorter episode this week, but we hit the highlights with games such as For Northwood!, Coffee Roaster, Regicide Legacy, Dead Cells: The Rogue-Like Board Game, Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, Tainted Grail: Tides of Ruin, Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, Underwater Cities, and Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game!

From solo only to solo mode adaptations, this game has something for everyone that has ever found themselves riding solo!

We want to hear from our listeners! Send us a text with recommendations, weigh in on discussions, or just say hi!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast, where the mission objective is to play more board games. Put your battle rattle on and mount up. Let's start the show. What is up everybody? Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. I am your host, Travis Smith, and today I am joined by no one. It is just me myself and I. Today, my co-hosts are enjoying some much-deserved time off, but we wanted to make sure that we put something out there for our religious listeners that tune in every week. So you just got me today, but I think it's going to be a great show. 're not going to do the debrief, we're not going to do all that other rigmarole stuff. Today we are just going to hop in and I want to share with you some solo games that I have on my mind and on my shelf that I want to get played over the next year. So I'm just going to jump right in the very first one. We're going to probably go lightest to heaviest. First one is For Northwood. I've heard people talk about this for a long time, for Northwood is a solo trick-taking game Solo only. It's published in 2021 by Bad Boom Games, sometimes published by CIMON Global Limited. Designer is Wilhelm Su. It's a solo hand management and precision trick-taking game. Your objective is to peacefully unify the kingdom of Northwood through conversations with their rulers. Over eight rounds, you must visit eight animal fiefs and engage their rulers in dialogues, which are the tricks? This seems really cool. I've heard people talk about this a lot. I own a copy of it, but I have not played it yet. I'm really looking forward to it. It's got a 1.83 weight and plays in 15 to 30 minutes, so really excited about this. Definitely want to get this on the table soon and it seems easy enough. The next game that I want to talk about that I want to get played is Coffee Roaster. Coffee Roaster was published in 2015. Designer is Sashi. It was published by Sashi and Sashi Angry Lion Games Big Fun Games, depending on your region, and Coffee Roaster is a solitaire pool building game or bag building game. So you are putting beans into your bag and drawing them out at the appropriate times. The bag is like your roaster and you're pulling the beans out to create these different types of roasts that then you sell. Seems like a really cool mechanic. I love coffee and I love bag-building games, so really looking forward to this. One Seems easy enough. Plays in 10 to 30 minutes. Weight is 2.12 out of 5 on BGG. Really looking forward to this. As an avid coffee drinker myself, this is right up my alley. This would make a great gift for any coffee lovers that also love board games. Coffee Roaster, published in 2015. Looking forward to playing that. The next game that I want to talk about is Regicide Legacy. This game is not released yet, but I do love the Regicide system. Regicide was published in 2020 by Badgers for Mars. Plays in 10 to 30 minutes. It's a one to four player game that is basically taking a regular deck of cards and making it a roguelike game where you are trying to use the hands as precisely and efficiently as you can to defeat the face cards which are your bosses. Basically, that you're trying to work your way through. It's a really simple system. If you read the rules online, you could basically buy a deck of cards and play this with just that deck of cards. It's really cool because the base deck comes with some really cool art on a basic deck of cards that you could then use to play other card games. I guess, if you want, I have not done that, but Regicide is a really cool system and Regicide Legacy is an evolution of that, so it is a follow-up to the 2020 Regicide and it's a co-op campaign game spread over 12 missions. I love the Regicide system. I love the Regicide game. Regicide app is great, so I'm really looking forward to Redicide Legacy coming out in 2025 from Badgers from Mars. The next game that's been on my mind that I definitely want to get to the table and that showed up just a couple months ago is Dead Cells. The roguelike board game Dead Cells is published by Scorpion Mass Games makers of Sky Team, and this production is beautiful. If you want to see a copy of the production, go on our Instagram. I took a reel of me unboxing. This thing Seems really cool. You are taking your character, upgrading them as you go through these levels. It comes with this really nice board that's got these kind of tuck sleeves that you can tuck these cards in to upgrade your character. As you work your way through these levels, you get different perks. You have surprise boxes that you open up between levels, and it seems like a really cool system. Some of these roguelike systems made into board games are not very efficient. Sometimes they uh it doesn't feel very much like a, like a video game and with credentials like scorpion mask, I'm really hoping that they pull this one off. I've seen nothing but good things about this. It's got an 8.2 rating on bgg, so I'm really looking forward to this hitting the table asap. The next game I want to get played is the lord of the rings journeys in middle earth, published in 2019 by Fantasy Flight Games. If you've listened to this podcast before, you'll know that I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fan and a huge Fantasy Flight fan. Marvel Champions is one of my top games, and these types of tabletop RPG-type card games like Journeys in Middle-Earth are definitely on the top of my list of games to get played this year. I only have the core set right now, but I've heard great things about this system. You are working cooperatively to fend off the forces of Mordor and work your way through this campaign. I know that there are apps out there that will help you run through this campaign by yourself. Maybe I'll play two-handed, I'm not sure. So Lord of the Rings Journeys in Middle-Earth is one that I definitely want to try out and mess with the systems a little bit. Seems like a really cool concept and I definitely want to dive in and see if I want to expand this game at all. Next up in complexity is Tainted Grail Kings of Ruin. This is a 2024 publication by Awaken Realms. This is a pretty big box. It comes with a lot of different miniatures. It comes with a fold-out booklet. The Kickstarter version came with this welcome letter to the Tainted Grail universe. It seems really cool. I love games like Mage Knight and I've actually played the games like Mage Knight and I've actually played the Tainted Grail video game and I quite enjoyed that. So I know that the Tainted Grail universe is expansive and complex, much like the Witcher universe or something like that. It's pretty deep and I don't have a whole lot of knowledge about it. But this game looks amazing, the miniatures are phenomenal and I definitely want to get this played once I finally work my way through the rule book and understand the systems, because this game is a little more complex. It's got a weight of 3.24 out of five, but it's highly reviewed. People seem to really love this universe. People keep coming back for more. They've put out a couple of these different big box Tainted Grail games and I definitely love a good tabletop RPG, so Tainted Grail Kings of Ruin is definitely one that I want to get played this year. Next up is a game that I have owned for a while, but I have not played it solo. They just came out with the solo version not too long ago. It is Batman Gotham City Chronicles. This game was originally published in 2019 by Monolith Board Games. They are a French developer, I believe, and when this game first came out, the rulebook was horrible. It was badly translated, it was hard to follow and people had to basically wait for fans to come up with a fan translation of the rulebook that actually made sense. Since then, they've improved and they just released Chapter 3 in this Batman Gotham Cities Chronicles series, and that came with an updated rulebook, a solo mode and a cooperative mode. This game is huge tons of minis. It's got Batman characters from all across the Batman universe and, as a huge Batman fan myself, I really love this property. I love this board game. I just can't wait to play it solo and or cooperative, because that seems like a really cool system. Previously it was one player played the bad guys, the other one played the good guys Batman and his bat family versus whatever Gotham City rogues gallery villain that they wanted to play as, and now you can play those cooperatively against an ai bot that will play the bad guys or the good guys. So, plus, they came up with the bat computer files, which are missions that you can run through to get a different flavor of the game and to push your skills, test your skills out again. So, yeah, really looking forward to playing this new chapter three of Batman Gotham City Chronicles. Next game up is Underwater Cities. Underwater Cities was published in 2018 by Delicious Games. I've heard this game talked about and ranted about and raved about for a long time. It's a city builder, economy builder, engine builder about building a city underwater, and I own this game. It's been sitting on the shelf for a while and I have never dipped into it. It's very highly rated. It's got an 8.1 rating on BGG, it's got a 3.58 weight and I've just never really busted this out to play it. It seems a little daunting to me and I'm not really sure why, but I definitely want to dig into this because it has a solo mode that you can play and it's only 30 to 45 minutes per player. So maybe I can get it out and play a couple rounds back to back to back and get a feel for the rules and then maybe introduce it to some of my friends, because I really want to get this played. I actually have the expansion for it, which is called New Discoveries, which is even higher rated, but I have not played the base game yet, so definitely want to get Underwater Cities 2018 production by Delicious Games, to the table. The last game, and the most complex of all the games that I've mentioned, is Zoo Tycoon, the Board Game. This was designed by Mark Durr, creator of Wild Duo, which I love, and published by Treeser Games. Zoo Tycoon, as you might remember, was originally a PC game in the vein of Roller Coaster Tycoon, where you build a zoo instead of a theme park. Zoo Tycoon is an adaptation of that video game into a tabletop game, and so this showed up a couple months ago and it seems a little daunting. The box is super heavy and it has a thousand mini little meeples in it, but in this game, you play across seven rounds, which are representative of the years, and each year or round has its different seasons where different things happen, and you are trying to increase the popularity of your zoo by building enclosures, breeding animals, building food booths, zoo shops, attractions, things like that, and then you are trying to balance the popularity of your park with the conservation of the animals and the ecosystem and nature, so it seems like a really cool system. I just don't really know a whole lot about this game. I backed it because I love Markter's other creations and I have a fondness for the Zoo Tycoon property, so I definitely want to get this to the table and try out the solo mode. The playtime is a little long it's two to three hours but I imagine if you're playing by yourself it'll go a lot faster than that once you figure the systems out. So definitely want to mess around with this a little bit. It's just a little daunting. I've watched a couple videos on it and it seems really foreign at this point. So I definitely need to do my research before diving into this one. And those are the solo games that I wanted to share with you. I will go over the fence and say that I've been reading a couple books that are not great, and I actually just watched season two of Arcane, which was phenomenal. Arcane is based on the League of Legends video game, but you don't need to know anything about the video game to appreciate the show. It's about a futuristic society that is mixing technology with magic and the different factions that are vying for power, and it's pretty interesting. Give the first couple episodes a watch. It is a slow buildup, but once you get into the actual conflicts, it is a really well animated and really well acted show. The voice actors are all amazing. I wish I could shout out their names, but I don't know many of them and you can stream that right now on Netflix. Season two is only an improvement on the first season, so maybe you were kind of middling on the first season. Second season really gets into the political drama and conflict. The characters are well developed at this point and the fruits of the first season are now ready for harvest. So Arcane season two on Netflix now, and I think I'll wrap it up because I find it a little strange to talk into a mic by myself. So thank you all for listening. Thank you for tuning in weekly to the Operation Game Night podcast. Jared Clay and myself, we all really enjoy doing this weekly. We like getting together and talking about board games, we like catching up with one another and, more importantly, we like interacting with you all. So if you're not following us on Instagram, follow us on Instagram at Operation Game Night Podcast. Give us a listen, give us a like and tell your friends about us, because we really enjoy the community that is out there surrounding board games. When people write us on Instagram, we get back to them as soon as we can. We are always taking feedback from people that are reaching out to us. So, please, if you want to hear us talk about something, if you want us to cover a certain topic, if you want us to just give you a shout out, go ahead and reach out to us on Instagram and we will do that. There should also be a link in the show notes to message us. So if you want to get a hold of us that way, you go ahead and click that link. It'll actually send you to your text messaging app. You send us a text message and we can get it. All of us will see it, we'll read it and we can shout you out on the air. So thank you all for listening. We appreciate you, we appreciate the hobby, we appreciate the community and we will be back next week with some great stuff. We have some really exciting content coming up, some collaborations. We have a reporter in the field at PAXU that's going to come on and debrief PAXU for us, and we have some awesome other surprises coming up. So keep listening, keep tuning in and we will see you next week For Operation Game Night. I have been Travis Smith and we are out.