Solo and Co-op Games

More insights from the BGG data set

Solo play is another trend I’ve wanted to look into. The proportion of games allowing solo play has grown significantly over the last decade. On BGG, 22.3% of all board games published in 2019 are described as supporting solo mode. This figure becomes even larger, 27.55%, if we only count games owned by 10 or more people.

Solo play seems to be as much a growing trend as is cooperative play. Can there be a connection between the two?

Daniel Stephens @echo354

@polenyk It would be interesting to compare this to the number of games over the last decade that support solo play. I feel like that solo play has become much more popular recently, and cooperative games are more easily made to play solo, so that could partially account for this.

As Daniel hypothesized in his tweet, from the design perspective, it might be easier to create a solo mode for a cooperative game than for a competitive game.

Indeed, cooperative games with solo play represent the fastest growing segment. The only segment that shrank in the last couple of years is “Co-op, No Solo”. And “Competitive, Has Solo” has grown only a little.

Thanks for reading, and let me know your thoughts on cooperative vs solo in board games. In particular, I’m curious to hear:

• Which cooperative mechanics make it harder to implement a solo mode?

• What are your favorite games for solo play?

Feel free to contact me via twitter or email.

For more information about the dataset see my previous post:

• The Rise of Cooperation