I own games with genuinely excellent solo modes, automas that feel like real opponents instead of a token gesture bolted on to sell more copies, and I basically never use them. This is not because I think solo play is lesser, exactly. I’ve read enough reviews from people who swear by it, who say it’s their preferred way to actually engage with a design, to know it’s a legitimate way to play and not some consolation prize for people without a group. It’s just not what I actually want out of a game, and it took me a while to figure out why.

The honest answer is that I don’t actually want to solve a puzzle by myself. I want to watch someone else half-solve it in a way I hadn’t considered, the way Priya does at Thursday group, or fail to solve it in a way that makes the table groan collectively, which is its own kind of pleasure that no bot opponent has ever given me. A game against an automa can be tight, mechanically satisfying, genuinely well designed, and it still doesn’t produce the thing I actually show up for, which is watching five other specific people’s brains work through the same problem in five different ways.

There’s also something about accountability that a solo session doesn’t have. If I lose to Denise at something, I can ask her what she saw that I didn’t, and usually get an answer that actually teaches me something for next time. If I lose to a deck of automa cards, there’s nobody to ask, no actual mind behind the decisions, just a set of rules executing themselves with reasonable competence. That’s a fine thing for a game to offer. It’s not the thing I’m there for.

I’ll admit this gets inconvenient in specific ways, mostly around timing, since a six person group that only meets Thursdays means anything I want to actually play has to wait its turn in the queue, sometimes for weeks, while the automa mode is sitting right there in the box ready whenever I am. I’ve picked up a game plenty of times intending to just try the solo mode to see what all the praise was about, and put it back down within twenty minutes because it wasn’t scratching the itch I actually had.

Maybe this changes eventually. Maybe I’ll move somewhere without a Thursday group and suddenly discover I like the automa more than I expected to. For now, though, I keep buying games partly for their solo mode’s reputation and then almost never touching it, which I recognize is a strange way to shop, and I’ve mostly stopped pretending otherwise.

If anything, I’ve started treating a strong solo mode as a proxy for how well the whole system was designed rather than a feature I intend to use myself, a kind of quality signal I trust even while ignoring the thing it’s actually measuring. Backward logic, probably. It’s held up well enough as a shortcut that I haven’t bothered fixing it.