Musings on solo wargaming

During the last year my pal Alexander dragged me in the world of solo wargaming. Talking about that, my best fantasy solo experience in gaming, a part from videogaming, were my beloved game books such as the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever. Absolutely the best in town.

Lone Wolf in the original majestic illustration by Gary Chalk

Thanks to Alexander I experienced the fantastic solo wargaming books by Mike Lambo, a series of rules written for playing in various settings, all solo. They’re really well conceived and finely written, and we nearly finished one of the books, Ghost in the Jungle. More on that in a subsequent post.

So, since I bought HeroQuest I started to imagine a way to play HeroQuest solo. The official app would be a perfect way to do so — but Grimbeorn and I started the campaign together with the quests from the core box, and I don’t want to spoil our journey by playing that in advance in solo mode. On the internet there are several suggestions and mods I could look for, but they’re often complicated, need to print cards and stuff and assume you have one or two expansions in your collection, which I have not (for now).

On the way of building my setting for Solo HeroQuest, I needed to keep things easy. I needed some inspiration. And it came once again from Alexander, who is a game designer himself (even though he’d laugh reading this) and told me about a miniature game, new to me, born to be played both solo or co-op, with a nice and simple system to manage the bad guys: Rangers of Shadow Deep.

I read the rulebook and I honestly really liked the system and the setting. It kinda has a Lone Wolf vibe, too: all these Rangers and the dreadful and mysterious Shadow Deep phagocytizing the land… woah. I pitched Grimbeorn on trying that too, as always — I used a comparison between RoSD and Knights of the Old Republic, the epic roleplaying videogame set in the Star Wars universe in which you explore and fight with an interchangeable party of companions.

Knights of the Old Republic is one of Grimbeorn favourites ever. I really like it even though I never finished the game — Grimbeorn hates me

In the purpose of both try out RoSD and find ideas in developing Solo HeroQuest, I started my journey in solo miniature wargaming by prepping my first RoSD game.

Musings on tabletop dungeon crawlers - Warhammer Quest vs HeroQuest

I've always been keen on dungeon crawlers, since the first Diablo came on my PC. Even if during our rolegame sessions we never really played lots of dungeon-type situation, in our WFB campaigns there were often typical dungeons in which the Hero must survive to achieve some narrative objectives. Years ago, thanks to a former friend, we used the tiles from Advanced HeroQuest to create this dungeons. Then I printed something similar (in monochrome to economize; I still have and use those), and we even tried the original HeroQuest, which I really liked even if we played just few games.

Random Diablo pic just for pure love