I get a specific reaction when I mention I’d rather play a solo mode tonight than wait for a group. people assume it’s about scheduling, that I’d obviously prefer other people if I could get them, and solo is just what happens when the group falls through. some weeks that’s true. plenty of weeks it isn’t, and I’ve stopped apologizing for the difference.

there’s a version of a weeknight where I get home from the museum, tired in a specific way that isn’t about the work being hard exactly, it’s about having spent all day managing other people’s questions, other people’s donations, other people’s schedules, and what I actually want isn’t no games, it’s a game with nobody else’s timing to account for. I set up on my own table, run the bot through its automated logic, and get to sit with a puzzle that’s entirely mine to solve or fail at, on my own clock, with nobody watching me think.

I judge a solo mode almost like its own separate design, not a stripped down afterthought bolted onto the real multiplayer game. a good one, the automated opponent making choices that feel plausible rather than random, genuinely stands up as an experience in itself. I’ve played bad ones too, ones that clearly got fifteen minutes of design attention after the multiplayer game shipped, and the difference is obvious within the first round, you can feel when a system was actually built with intention versus patched on to check a box.

there’s something almost meditative about it that multiplayer doesn’t give me, not because other people are bad, I love my Thursday group genuinely, but because a solo session has a different rhythm entirely. no explaining a rule to someone new. no reading the table for whether energy’s flagging. just the puzzle, and me, and however long I want to sit with it.

I think part of why this doesn’t feel like settling is that my job is so social in its own quiet way, visitors, donors, coworkers, questions all day, that an evening with exactly zero social overhead reads to me as restorative rather than lonely. other people I know feel the opposite, solo time at the end of a long day sounds isolating rather than restful to them. I don’t think either read is wrong. I just know mine.

so no, I’m not settling when I choose the bot over waiting for a fourth player. some nights the bot is who I actually wanted to play.