Playing board games solo can be entirely joyful. Maybe you don’t have friends who are into board games at all. Maybe your pals are far away, or busy. Whatever the case, don’t let anybody tell you that playing board games alone is somehow a lesser experience. Plenty of tabletop gaming experiences are designed with single players in mind. Some let you wander genuinely alone, with adjusted difficulty as you encounter combat or puzzle scenarios. Some give you an NPC to wander with. Some are just more fun alone, with cool designs that create feelings of excitement and discovery with every card turn or tile flip.
If you’re keen to venture alone, defying the odds in solo skirmishes (whether of the more relaxing or tense kind), then read on. After years of playing and loving solo board games, I feel suitably equipped to whittle down my favourites, into a curated lot of fantastic experiences for single players of all persuasions.
Here’s the ScreenHub picks for the best solo board games to pick up and play.
Best Solo Board Games – ScreenHub’s Picks
Marvel Champions: The Card Game
Marvel Champions: The Card Game is a superhero strategy game where players take control of Marvel heroes on a quest to defeat an encroaching array of villains. In turns, players deploy their particular heroes, and then must overcome new and ever-more-dangerous scenarios, determined by the flip of cards. What’s most exciting about Marvel Champions, as a solo board games player, is that no two scenarios play out the same, with elements of chance determining how they unfold, and whether players are able to succeed in battle.
The base version of Marvel Champions: The Card Game has several scenarios to play through, with random chance in each event, as well as a number of heroes with varied abilities. Then, if you’re looking for a new challenge, an array of expansions will give you what you’re looking for.
Marvel United
If you’re keen to continue the Marvel theme in your solo board games sessions, you can also pick up Marvel United for an equally action-heavy, colourful time. This miniatures battle game lets you select a team of heroes to face off against eclectic villains, with a deck of cards determining your success. That sounds a lot like Marvel Champions, right? But where Marvel United differs is in its combat mechanics, and in how battles play out. There’s a lot more drama to this particular game, with miniatures helping to give a sense of place, and helping you visualise the action as it happens.
Like Marvel Champions, this game also has a plethora of expansions available, with nearly every hero of the Marvel universe represented across multiple add-ons, including an array of standalone board games that function with the base game.
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
For more licensed goodness, check out The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. By mechanics and playability, this title is a lot like Marvel Champions, in that you’re guiding a team of heroes across a magical world, completing various quests based on the drawing of cards. The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game similarly features strong story elements, with the base game including an array of cards that spell out various dark, winding scenarios.
With Sauron’s forces mounting against you, this game tasks you with standing against the darkness, deploying your heroes wisely to defeat enemies and meet quest objectives. Like Marvel Champions, it’s also a game that’s been massively expanded since launch, so you can journey through the base game’s sweeping story, and once you’ve completed this challenge, many more tales await.
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth is also a fantastic solo board games experience. This is entirely different from the LOTR card game: it adapts the action of the beloved book/film series into a more visual realm, pairing physical tiles with a digital app that brings your quest to life. To set up this game, you’ll place an array of tiles around you, representing an area that you’ll explore and quest within. Then, the app will let you interact with these spaces, venturing forward, investigating locations, and eventually heading into battle against orcs.
With the entire thing guided by an app, you get an absolutely lovely video game-esque experience, while maintaining the joy of physically moving your characters across a board.
Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion
Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion is one of the stranger picks for this list of the best solo board games, but it certainly deserves a spot, whether you enjoy Scooby-Doo or not. It’s best to think of this game as a haunted house escape room simulator. You control the iconic Scooby Gang as they roam through a strange mansion, with all sorts of unique quirks. On one tile, you might find a mysterious item, or a trap door. In another, you might encounter a ghost. Your job is to travel through various locations, represented by tiles, and eventually figure out exactly what’s going on around you, using clues to solve puzzles along the way.
Escape from the Haunted Mansion is one of the lighter board games on this list, but it’s plenty satisfying if you’re looking for a short, sharp tabletop adventure for a quiet afternoon. When you’re done with this particular game, you can also check out other, similar titles from the Coded Chronicles series: The Shining: Escape from the Overlook Hotel, and The Goonies: Escape with One-eyed Willie’s Rich Stuff.
Mansions of Madness
Mansions of Madness is actually the game The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth is heavily inspired by, so if you’re looking for an immersive hybrid board games adventure, you can also start here. As with its successor, Mansions of Madness lets you travel along a physical board game, using a virtual app to determine your path forward. In this particular game, you’re dealing with more horrific circumstances, like spiders coming out the walls, or sea people suddenly arising from the ocean. The game is inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, after all.
What works so well about Mansions of Madness is that it pairs story and strategy so well. With the app’s guidance, you can run through wild and dramatic scenarios, with each move you make revealing more of the game’s story, and pushing you further into the darkness.
The 7th Citadel
If adventure and exploration are on your mind, you can also find this in The 7th Citadel, a card-based game that takes you across a ‘post-apocalyptic medieval fantasy world’ full of magic and danger. Escaping your former station, you are a wanderer who must journey through a hostile world in search of freedom and peace. Your path is determined by the flip of cards, each with their own unique pathways to travel. Discovering a mountainous region, you might decide to turn left, sealing a deadly fate. If you turn right, you could encounter a traveller who leads you in the right direction, or gives you goods to speed your destiny.
The 7th Citadel is an incredible experience as a solo board games player. It really does let you travel freely, with a gameplay system that promises a new adventure every time you play. There’s so much variation in this particular game that you could play for hundreds of hours, and never get the same outcome twice.
Onirim
Onirim is one of the smaller board games on this list, but that doesn’t make it any less mighty. In this game, which can be played with one or two players, you are a dreamer looking to find an exit from their nightmares. With each new card played, you encounter some strange and bizarre new dream, all depicted in a lovely, painterly art style that makes Onimirim a feverish experience.
The ultimate goal of this game is to obtain special Door cards, by taking on a range of actions in defiance of your encroaching nightmares. You may also be disrupted by those same nightmares in your journey, which force you to overcome great and terrible challenges. As a solo player, Onirim is engaging for its strategy gameplay, but you’ll also spend plenty of time admiring its eccentric artwork, too.
Elder Sign
If you’re keen for something like Mansions of Madness, but you’re looking for a more traditional solo board games experience, then Elder Sign is your next best option. This is another eldritch horror adventure, but this go around, the action is determined by dice rolls, and your intrepid nature. Here, you take the role of an investigator working to defeat the Ancient Ones by gathering particular magical tools and texts as you journey through various locations.
The theming here is very strong, so that as you journey, you’re constantly aware of horrors roaming at your back. It also adds stakes to every dice roll, as any wrong step may lead to death or insanity. Keep your wits about you, and Elder Sign will reward you with a rich, horrific time.
The Dark Quarter
The Dark Quarter is an absolutely lush dark fantasy adventure that lets you roam a sleek version of New Orleans in the 1980s. As with Mansions of Madness, this is a game guided by an app, with deep storytelling allowing you to fully embody a special agent attempting to solve the worst crimes of their surrounds. There’s shades of Constantine in this adventure, as well as other urban fantasy stories, with dark and supernatural elements creeping in from the sidelines.
While The Dark Quarter is fairly heavy on the set-up, once you’ve reckoned with its gameplay and how its storytelling works, you’re in for an absolutely fantastic solo board games experience. It’s one of the most engaging new games of the modern era, and looks absolutely fantastic to boot.
Cartaventura
The Cartaventura series comprises great solo card games that are a bit like The 7th Citadel by design. You get a small deck of cards to tell your unique story, and then you follow clues in the text to find your way across various landscapes. With each new card draw, you have new options for adventuring. You might choose to travel south, and encounter a progress-stopping blizzard in your travels. Make a wrong turn, and you could actually wind up dead, and replaced in new adventures by your child or your grandchild. In these tiny cards, you get epic, sweeping stories across generations.
Lhasa is a great place to start with this series, as it tells the rollercoaster journey of an adventurer wandering through Ceylon, India, the Himalayas, and to Lhasa, Tibet. There’s also Vinland, which follows Vikings, and a range of other adventures to parse (although it’s worth noting some of them are harder to find than others).
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – The Adventure Game
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – The Adventure Game is an absolutely whopping board game filled with so many pieces, all with their own purpose. If you’ve got the patience to figure out exactly where each one goes, and what’s needed to tackle an adventure, then it’s an absolutely rewarding solo board games experience. You don’t even need to have played Skyrim to enjoy it – you get all the context you need across scenario books that guide your way.
These provide background to let you enjoy life in a magical fantasy world, where you traverse towns that hide danger in every corner. Playing through an overarching campaign, you’ll face off against lizard people and vampires, all as a much larger threats grow on the horizon. Stay patient as this story unravels, and you’ll find plenty satisfying in this board games adventure.
What Next?
If you’re looking for a quirkier adventure as a solo board games player, look no further than What Next?, the pick-your-path game that lets you romp through a menagerie of strange and wonderful experiences. Across three adventures, you’ll make a variety of decisions that let you go your own way, with little dexerity challenges along the way determining success or failure.
Unlike some of the other board games on this list, What Next? is a much lighter experience, more akin to a party game, but its storytelling elements and sense of humour make it a blast anyway. Board games can be many things, and sometimes they’re just simple, light-hearted fun.
