I never realized how many subgenres were hiding beneath the not very sexy banner of “solo tabletop gaming”. Perhaps fittingly, each niche of this world largely squirrels away into its own community. The TTRPG soloist creating worlds in a journal doesn’t often intersect with the crunchy wargamer pouring over charts, chits, and hexes.
I’m writing this post as a newbie to this world trying to discover these various corners and where I fit in, but also to organize my thoughts in one place because sometimes a game is too gamey for RPGers or too freeform for board gamers.
Of course I haven’t played all these and nothing here is sponsored/affiliate. They’re mostly games I’m interested in.
I am cautious of any game that wasn’t designed for solitaire play first. It’s easy (relatively) to design and playtest a game that works for 4 players. It is hard to design and playtest a game that works equally well for 1-6 players.
Any co-op game works well solo. You just get to steal all the fun for yourself. Many games are designed with a single player in mind. There are a million of these if you just search BGG.
Not really a genre, but many PNP games are $5 itch.io downloads that you can play with a pencil and some dice. Some of these games are so niche they’d never see anything but self-publishing. And some are cheap versions of board games where crafting the game becomes a hobby unto itself.
I’m not sure when we decided wargames and board games are two different things, but we did. Wargames often involve obscure militaria, fiddly chits, big maps, and a gluttonous desire for simulationist rules.
Miniature wargames are a multilayered hobby and even moreso when you get into the smaller games. There is always a competitive aspect, narrative scenario aspect, and model painting aspect. Most of these smaller games are model-agnostic, meaning you can use your existing miniatures, start 3D printing, construct terrain, even design your own minis.
The “lifestyle game” aspect of some miniature wargames is the appeal to many. If you get into the right game, you can spend all your free time buying, painting, crafting, reading dense rulebooks, pondering armies, and (from time to time) even playing the game!
You can play any TTRPG you want with some imagination, pen and paper, and maybe some solo rules supplements. This usually comes in the form of asking an oracle for guidance on how the story progresses. This can be as dense as a binder full of hundreds of oracle tables or as simple as d6 where the results mean “Yes And”, “Yes”, “Yes But”, “No And”, “No But”, and “No Because”. Mythic Game Master Emulator is an especially popular system that handles the structure of most traditional RPGs, although there are game-specific supplements as well.
RPGs specifically structured for solo play. They come in a wide spectrum from lighter rules and narrative focus to crunchy grids, dice, and tables, although in general most solo RPGs are interested in taking you on an unlimited adventure with a neverending story rather than loading up on character stats and sweet loot.
The Traveller New Era supplement Fire, Fusion, & Steel has rules for solar arrays including a table showing how the mass per square meter of panel decreases from 8kg down to 1kg as civilization technology level increases. Of course, the cells subequently become logarithmically cheaper and 0.05MW more efficient per cubic meter. Below this is a table of 10 levels of battery discharge rates.
Sometimes RPG systems are interesting but there is no one in your circles, or no one on Earth, who is going to implement them at the table with you. They’re just fun to mess with yourself.
Games that prompt you with open ended questions to which you write your reaction and continue the story. Something like “You walk outside. Something bright and horrible is in the sky. What do you see?”. These come in many styles, some with linear narratives, and some with all the dice, charts, and cards of other RPGs.
There are many generators to generate, populate, and enliven your own little worlds. It’s like DM prep without having to DM afterwards. As they say “Prep is play.”
These lie in between TTRPGs and board games. They usually don’t have a win/lose condition to achieve in one session like you’d expect a board game to, but they have a more structured set of rules and a gameplay loop than most RPGs. So while they’re not RPGs, they are RPG-adjacent with their similar dice mechanics, character sheets, and (usually) medieval fantasy adventures.
These four are almost always the universally recommended ones as of early 2025:
These are books where you’d often generate a character, keep track of stats, and make dice rolls (or otherwise randomize certain elements). The classic British game books were gamier than the American choose your own adventure style books.
Many of these have digital versions and apps now, but that takes away the charm, doesn’t it?
I won’t belabor this list with every last crossword puzzle, sudoku, and wimmelbilderbuch but a few more books of interest include:
There are many tabletop games that emulate the sequential puzzles of an escape room or require players to use deductive reasoning to solve a mystery. While these are different genres, they are linked in that they’re generally one-shot tabletop experiences rather than replayable games.
Unfortunately, in my experience many of the no-name brands are very easy and low quality experiences.
There are many small solo analog gaming channels you can search, but two I’d strongly recommend are: