How I designed the solo rules for Fantastic Factories
I have a confession to make. Before I designed Fantastic Factories, I had never played a single hobby board game solo. So I hesitate a bit to write about this topic because I’m far from an expert or even experienced in playing solo games — much less designing them!
However, I have noticed with the ongoing pandemic and from posts on BoardGameGeek that the solo mode of Fantastic Factories is quite popular and well regarded. I figured there may be some value in talking about how I ended up designing the solo rules for Fantastic Factories and the philosophy I followed.
Why solo rules?
First off, why design solo rules for a game that is normally played with multiple players? At the time there was quite the trend on Kickstarter to offer solo rules for games. Certainly from a product marketing perspective, including solo players opens up a whole different audience you can tap into.
One thing I wanted to be sure of, though, was whatever rules I came up with would deliver a full and proper experience and not just be tacked on to sell more copies of the game.
Second, Fantastic Factories is admittedly a bit of a multiplayer solitaire game and as such, I felt it lends itself well to being played solo.
Uphold the core experience
When a board game has a solo mode, I believe it needs to deliver the same core experience as the multiplayer game. In a sense, it needs to simulate the behavior of other players.
It may be tempting to build a complex decision engine to map out exactly how each AI opponent might play their and react to board state, but following a flow chart and managing all that game state is simply a lot of overhead for a player to perform.
Emulate outcomes, not decisions
One effective way to build an AI with less overhead is to focus on how an opponent affects the board state instead of the complex “why” behind an opponent’s decision making. In general, it doesn’t matter the rationale or motivation behind a move. It only matters in how it limits you, the solo player, and what available choices you have.
For example, in Fantastic Factories most of the player interaction comes from the market phase where players draft cards. In the vast majority of cases, what kind of factory compound your opponents are building doesn’t affect you or your turn. You only care if the card you want is still available or not. As a result, in the solo rules, the AI (endearingly called “The Machine”) simply drafts a card at random. This allows the solo player to experience the rare but visceral moment of when someone takes the card they absolutely need, derailing their plan, and forcing a shift in strategy.
Another core experience of Fantastic Factories is the feeling of momentum as the game builds up and each round gets more and more explosive. To that end, I knew that I wanted The Machine to also accelerate in the way they accumulate points. As the solo player gets their points engine online, The Machine seemingly reciprocates, creating this tense race to the finish. It also helps that The Machine starts with a few extra points to start, allowing the player to begin in the underdog position and provides an opportunity to overtake The Machine at the end.
The reality is that it doesn’t matter where The Machine’s points come from. It only matters that they accumulate at a similar rate and with as much unpredictability and volatility as a human opponent’s points would. The trick is to model this scoring behavior with components already included with the game and with as little overhead as possible.
I ended up having The Machine build up a tableau of cards just like the solo player. The main difference being that The Machine doesn’t have to figure out complex interactions between factories but assumes a certain expected value and uses simple dice value comparisons to determine that semi-random outcome.
Different kinds of solo games
As I wrap up, it’s worth noting that what I’ve written here is mostly in reference to solo games with an AI or emulated opponent. It can be perfectly valid to simply take your game and make the solo mode a “beat this score” game. Additionally not all games can be justified to have a solo mode. Before you start writing rules for a solo mode of your game, just consider what the core experience should be and which kind of solo rules makes the most sense for your game.
Same experience without playing both sides
In the end, it’s about having the solo player make the same tough decisions and feel the same emotions as if they were playing against a human player. That really just boils down to keeping the solo player’s turn as identical to the multiplayer game as possible and ensuring that any game state management isn’t onerous or requires so many steps that you feel like you’re playing against yourself.
