Top 10 Heavy Weight Solo Board Games

0:00 hello everybody Welcome to toally tabled my name is Shaggy and today I'm writing down my top 10 heavyweight solo board games this is the fifth and final video in a series of videos where I break down my favorite solo games into five different complexity levels check out the entire series if you haven't the links are in the description below this video has been sponsored by Liberation game design and their board game Dutch resistance orange shall overcome it Cooperative game for 1 to five players currently seeking funding on Kickstarter in Dutch resistance or in shall overcome players take the role of members of the Dutch resistance during the final years of World War II this is a scenario-based game where you'll be working together to accomplish specific goals including various forms of non-violent resistance the characters and events are all rooted in history and it comes with multiple solo modes that allow you to play the game with just one character check out my overview video if you want to learn more and if any of this sounds interesting please go check out their Kickstarter campaign it ends on June 5th so this is their final week of funding a link is in the description below and with that let's get started with my number 10 heavyweight solo game Great Western Trail for me Great Western Trail is right on the edge between medium heavy and heavyweight it slightly tipep to heavy when you add the rules for the

1:31 solo opponent which were introduced in the second edition I don't think Great Western Trail makes the best first impression but neither do most heavy games and once you Gro this one it really plays smoothly and offers fun crunchy decisions if you aren't familiar with Great Western Trail well first check out my playthrough video but at its core it's a deck building game where you're trying to build the perfect hand of cards you're moving your cowboy along and expanding Rondell of action locations trying to create a valuable hand of cattle by the time you reach the end of the path the trick is you can only count different types of cattle in your hand so duplicates are terrible luckily you can sell cows at different locations for money and use that money to purchase better cows there are also ways to permanently remove duplicate cows from your deck so ideally you'll be able to build a more valuable herd with each successive trip down the Great Western Trail the combination of hand tuning with deck building creates this cool engine building feel throughout the game there's so much more you can do including constructing new buildings which expands the trail and there's just so many different paths to Victory which is one of the things I just love the reason isn't higher on the list is because my favorite way to play Great Western Trail is with two players the new solo mode in the second edition does a great job of simulating that player

3:01 count with an AI That's fairly easy to manage after a bit of a learning curve it really is great at any player count and that's why it's my number 10 number nine is Spirit Island Spirit island is a popular Cooperative game where you play as a spirit defending an Island's inhabitants from colonizers you must either wipe the colonizers out or instill enough fear in them to make them leave by using deep strategic card play the colonizers have a programmed way they behave first appearing on the island then building and finally bliding the island so you have a lot of information to use to create plans for dealing with them I also like that some actions are fast and happen before the colonizer turn and others are slow so they happen after the colonizer turn the card play is really fun and it just all comes together so well now Spirit Island would be number one on most lists in fact this would be a lot of people's number one board game of all time period I have it a bit lower on my list because of how much more I like it with two players rather than solo this is a similar situation to Great Western Trail the problem here is I find using one Spirit to be a little bit dull and you really just miss out on the interaction and Cooper operation between the spirits which is a big part

4:32 of the game unfortunately I find running two Spirits two-handed it's just too much for my brain there are other games that are going to be on this list where running multiple characters doesn't bother me but here it does for some reason and really I just need to play more and get used to running two Spirits at a time as it is the solo game is just a little bit off for me but despite that I still really love Spirit Island and that's why it's number nine number eight is anacron anacron is a worker placement game with an intriguing sci-fi setting most of the world's population has been wiped out by a cataclysm centuries ago leaving most of the Earth uninhabitable in gameplay terms that means that in order to take actions outside of your faction settlement you must power up these mechs and place a worker inside of it and if you have the plastic minis you literally place your worker inside of it which is really satisfying in addition anacron does something that I wish more worker placement games did here you have four different types of workers each that are better or worse at certain actions and even incapable of doing others deciding which workers to activate and how many mechs to power up those are really brain burner decisions that require a lot of planning anacron also has a fun time travel kind

6:03 of element players can actually obtain goods from their future s in a kind of high Stakes time travel loan system where failure to repay your debts could lead to temporal anomalies and paradoxes that may endanger the time space continuum itself this is easily one of the most thinky worker placement games I've ever played and I really like the Thematic touches so there you go that's anacron my number eight number seven is vital lerta games okay it wouldn't be a totally tabled top 10 list without some Shenanigans so I'm just going to go ahead and throw in most of the tallera games here we're talking weather machine kban EV Lisboa the gallerist on Mars CO2 whichever one is your favorite now if I was forced to pick just one for solo play I'm actually going to throw curveball in there I'm going to go with his newest one inventions evolution of ideas I've done a full instructional playthrough for that one as well as a pretty lengthy First Impressions video where I really go over why I feel like this is his best game for solo it's certainly my favorite now if we're just talking favorite of all time it still goes to kban EV I absolutely adore that game and the solo is fantastic don't get me wrong but that game is just so good with four players inventions really seems to be designed for lower player counts and works so well solo because

7:36 you have these big long epic turns where you're taking an action and then you're comboing into another action which has a subaction and you can really do like four five six actions in a single turn just combo after combo that's what makes the game so great but it's also what can lead to some major AP some huge downtime you know if you're playing with a bunch of other players so playing it solo and and not having to worry about that and being able to Think Through Your turns and come up with these awesome combos it's just so satisfying and once you learn how to run the solo opponents you you do have to run two of them but one of them is so simple it takes like 10 seconds to run them and then the other one is relatively easy once you get going and once you understand how it works so the overhead to run the two solo opponents is much less especially compared to something like combon EV and even with weather machine so yeah check out those playthroughs I've also done playthroughs for weather machine and conbine EV so you can check those out I can also recommend the gallerist if you want a game that is maybe a little bit on the less complex side especially for these heavy games that might be a good starting point but I really don't think you can go wrong they're just all great that's my number seven pretty much any vital lerta game number six is Gloom Haven anytime I

9:06 talk about Gloom Haven I'm going to keep it nice and short and sweet because there's nothing that I can say that hasn't already been said this is one of the most beloved Cooperative games of all time it combines traditional campaign-based Dungeon Crawl mechanisms where you have a hero and it levels up and it gets better special abilities and weapons but it does away with d combat and replaces it with this brilliant card system which requires you know careful tactical planning each turn you basically have a hand of cards there's a top action and a bottom action and you're going to pick two of those cards and on one of them you're going to do the top action one of them you're going to do the bottom action and you're going to be using that to do everything to move to attack to loot to do everything and what's cool is your cards also represent your stamina so every time you cycle through your cards you have to lose one so your deck is like slowly dwindling and some of the more powerful special abilities make you remove the card they're one use and so there's a real timing element you have you're on a timer you can't take forever to complete these dungeons I really like that I think it works brilliantly and there's just a ton of scenarios in the campaign each one feels like a new puzzle to solve and it's not just a dice rolling luck Fest so there you go it's Gloom Haven it's it's got to be on the list it's my number six number five is a feast for Odin there's two things you need to talk

10:37 about when you talk about A Feast for Odin first is the giant Board of actions that you get to select from 60 some actions and while they're grouped together and you know a lot of them are just sort of variations or more powerful versions of others it's still pretty crazy and intimidating when you first look at it and then it's just a worker placement game some of those spots though require uh either one or two or three or four workers and you have a big pile of them and you put them out and you just have so many different things that you can do but all of it kind of gets you to the same spot which is collecting these polyomino tiles they're all different sizes and shapes and then you're going to be you know Tetris these things onto this board where you're just trying to fill up spaces as well as surround these you know bonus spaces which is going to get you extra income extra money extra resources and I think I say this every time I talk about a fees for Odin but there's just something so satisfying about placing out these polyomino tiles there are these really clever restrictions about you know what types of tiles can go next to other ones you have different resources and money you can use to fill in individual spaces and you know that every every one of those spaces that's left at the end of the game that's uncovered you're going to lose a point and so as you fill them in and you start to see those negative

12:08 points slowly disappear ah it's just like it feels so good that's my number five a fe for Odin my number four is Frost Punk Frost Punk is a Cooperative citybuilding survival board game based on the popular video game there's been an icy apocalypse and you you're attempting to grow your society around a giant coal power generator the only source of lifegiving warmth in a vast Tundra you use your workers to explore the snowy landscape gather resources like wood and coal in order to construct new buildings and keep the furnace lit depending on the heat some actions might have to be done in the cold which can make your workers sick so you're going to need to make sure that you have medicine and you have shelters to keep them warm and food and on top of all of that you have to manage their morale you might have to enact laws that are unpopular but will help you survive and every round you'll be faced with an event that might force you to make a difficult moral decision for me Frost Punk is the perfect video game adaptation because it takes the Bleak setting and stories from the video game but it concentrates the game play into a handful of critical meaningful decisions each round which is what board games do best this game is really heavy it's tough to learn it's long it's

13:38 brutally difficult it can feel punishing and unfair at times but given its story what else could you expect I just absolutely adore it frost Punk was my game of the year for 2022 and my opinion hasn't changed so there you go that's my number four Frost Punk number three is Mage Knight I think Mage Knight is best described as a demanding efficiency puzzle masquerading as a fantasy Adventure this is definitely not your typical Dungeon Crawl for one thing combat is completely deterministic but also everything that you do from moving to exploring the land to fighting off Orcs and sieging castles it's all done through a hand of multiuse cards really this is a bit of a deck builder you're not going to be adding a ton of cards to your deck but you're going to be adding some very critical ones and it's really all about how you use these cards and if you can use them as efficient as possible like I said every card is multi-use and upgradeable by using the right type of Mana so the possibilities are just endless for how you can play out your hand of cards along the way your hero your Mage Knight will be gaining experience leveling up adding additional powerful cards into their deck you know learning spells gaining

15:09 new recruits this game is all about squeezing out every last drop of Potential from your cards and when you do that it's an amazing feeling I'm on record I love puzzly games and Mage Knight is just the ultimate puzzle like a lot of the games on this list it's difficult to learn it's intimidating but I can't recommend it highly enough it's my number three Mage Knight number two is void fall void fall is best described as an epic space 4X Style game but for Euro Gamers this was my game of the year for 2023 and I considered to be one of the greatest solo games ever made you can check out my full playthrough videos to see for yourself why it earns such high praise it's certainly the heaviest game on this list the barrier to entry is high and the learning curves steep but once you know it the game play sings everything just makes sense and it's surprisingly easy to play a game of void fall takes place over three Cycles in each cycle you'll have four to six turns on your turn you play a focus card from your hand with three actions on it and most of the time you'll pick two of those

17:58 scenarios on the channel including one from the new book of Adventures which is a collection of several dozen scenarios both old and new the amount of quality content here is unprecedented the way that each scenario can just tweak a few rules and deliver a completely new and fresh experience as if you were playing a completely different game not only has no other game even come close to accomplishing something like this no other game has even tried to do it regardless of What scenario you're playing robins and Caruso features a really Innovative pushy luck worker placement mechanism where you decide whether to take one safe action or two risky actions each round the risky actions require you to roll dice which often result in events and encounters which require choices with actual consequences that trigger later in the game creating memorable and evocative stories out of strategic gameplay rather than having to read a bunch of text if you want proof just go check out my playthroughs and see the stories that emerge for yourself I really don't want to belabor the point here because I talk about this game all the time I'll just end by repeating something that I've said before and will continue to say Robinson cruso is a masterpiece and it's easily my number one heavyweight solo game of all time there you have it my top 10 heavyweight solo games I still have a

19:31 bunch of heavy games that I need to get to the table and no doubt many of you are annoyed that I consider Robinson Caruso a heavy game you probably have 50 war games that make Great Western Trail look like the Oregon Trail card game instead of arguing about all that please just let me know in the comments about a few of your favorites that didn't make the list and while you're at it like this video And subscribe to the channel you can't believe how important that is that's all for me thank you so much for watching and goodbye