You can now try out the solo mode for Hair of the Dog. One brave soul will try to pet seven dogs, without ever talking to their owners. Try to get the pets you need without ever coming into contact with some annoying bar rando. Download the PNP to test it out. As always, feedback is welcome and extremely helpful. This is our first foray into the world of one-player gaming, so we’ll spend the rest of the blog delving into our thought process and design philosophy.
On the surface, solo games seem to conflict with a central tenet of CPG design: the player is the most important component. All our games center around this: Far Away is as much about collaborating on an ecosystem as it is solving space problems, Catalyst forces you to factor your friends’ roleplaying choices into your strategic calculus, and Drink! is straight-up about observing other people. Hair of the Dog uses conditions to add a level of communication and discovery to the game. The game is very different when the group is open and happy to share, versus a guarded group who spends sips to defend secrets and positions the server with the authority of a military general. Hair of the Dog’s solo mode forgoes this negotiation in favor of amplifying the puzzle elements of the game.
With a solo board game, the player is obviously fundamental to the game. What differentiates quality of the solo experience is the level the game engages that player’s intelligence and creativity. Does the game force you to think or does it turn you into a computer processing an algorithm? What connects with a deeper brain level are meaningful choices. If one option is better than another, the choice is meaningless; you may be able to do other things, but if there’s no discernible reason to, they may as well not exist. Leather Armor +2 is better than Leather Armor +1, but is it better than Robes of Sneak +3? It’s unclear and, thus, fun!
You can distill this element of game design down to two things, two ways to remove the “correct” choice: randomness and obfuscation. A random element, like a die roll or a card draw, makes it impossible to accurately predict the future. You can account for probability, but you never really know what will happen. Done right, randomness adds some spice to a game. Players can have their plans derailed and have to develop new plans on the fly. Obfuscation generally means adding so many choices that the player can’t figure out what the best move is. Think chess: it may be a solved game, but a human could never plan out every possible move on their own. Obfuscating the options of other games is tricky though. You could make it annoyingly hard, but possible, to find the solution, which slows people down, or add so much complexity no one can parse the rules.
Hair of the Dog’s solo mode uses the Pet Conditions and randomness and the bar denizens as the obfuscation factor. You’ll have to learn the conditions as you go or get lucky with some guesses. Meanwhile, there are seven other occupants of the bar trying to engage you in terrible small talk. They have a little algorithm to dictate how they behave (we already did the roleplaying system). You can figure out what they’re going to do, but it’s just enough that keeping track of things isn’t easy. All of this combines to make a nice little puzzle for your brain to tease apart.
Garnishing this delicious puzzle is a dollop of storytelling. Each other person’s behavior card is labelled with an archetype: a class of person that’s all too frequent in your favorite bar. Will your night of solitude be ruined by a someone who’s single and looking to mingle? Or will a sports fan’s cheers drown out the playful barks of your favorite pup? We don’t want to make you monologue, so the mechanics will tell the story of that pub for the evening.
To be clear, all of this heady philosophy is the hope. We’re still putting the solo mode through its testing paces. The limits on the player should make failure common and success feel deeply rewarding. Please try it out and let us know how you did. Are things the right amount of random? Did you feel challenged but not hopeless? Are we missing your favorite frenemy in our list of characters? Download the print-and-play and share all those thoughts.
--Alex