Pack Your Bundle: Solo but not Alone 6
Jan. 19th, 2026 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knighthttps://itch.io/b/3481/solo-but-not-alone-6
I promise I can stop any time.
This is definitely a bundle of solo games, and I’m getting the ‘my dance card is full’ feeling; yes, a lot of these games look very yummy, but so did the last two bundles I’ve posted and there will always be more interesting games.
I have around 80 games in last year’s bundle, and several more bundles to go through. I *do* feel I’m making progress, but at the (maximum, unrealistic) rate of 1 game a day, I probably have a couple of years’ worth of itch.io bundle games. Never mind games I got from elsewhere, solo play I’m improvising, and games I play with others.
One thing this does is cure me of FOMO. Not yet in the ‘must buy all the things’ sense; I am not quite at the point where I will not buy a dedicated solo bundle; but I’m no longer buying other games even if they’re just a quid (or a couple of quid).
But now that I have them, I find myself wanting to process them, and having made a good start (I have done reviews, however short, of 40+ games) I want to continue, so I can reduce my mental load.
That means being ruthless. My ‘one topic a month’ project is not going too well; I got side-tracked this month and started on a different game so I’ll have to re-configure everything, and I’ve found a few more games/game styles that I wanted to add, so I’m now looking at September 2027, and I’m not even *trying* to find themes.
But there’s also a tremendous sense of achievement, of taming a mountain of STUFF and turning it into a library of choices; I’m starting to get a feel for which mechanisms work for me; what I like to do when I’m out of brain, what I want to borrow for a longer campaign maybe, how I can augment my practice.
In the long run I think I’ll end up with a pile of solo journalling things along the lines of Froggy Hat, With Iron Teeth or The Disguised Frog - good, wholesome, short fun. (This selection picked by scrolling down the list of reviews); but also hopefully with a pile of games that can form the baseline for longer adventures/more in-depth stories.
In the end I suspect I will end up in a similar space as Geek Gamer in this video – not with the exact resources, but with a similar pattern of I pick a general feel, I find a way to get the story started, pick a ruleset, build a character, and do some worldbuilding in any order.
While it's only fair (and educational) to play each solo game as it is intended (games not intended to be soloed will need amendments anyway) in the end, I see myself taking note what I particularly like about each game and then taking the best bits and making a story from them.
I'm not there yet, but I'm getting closer.
I promise I can stop any time.
This is definitely a bundle of solo games, and I’m getting the ‘my dance card is full’ feeling; yes, a lot of these games look very yummy, but so did the last two bundles I’ve posted and there will always be more interesting games.
I have around 80 games in last year’s bundle, and several more bundles to go through. I *do* feel I’m making progress, but at the (maximum, unrealistic) rate of 1 game a day, I probably have a couple of years’ worth of itch.io bundle games. Never mind games I got from elsewhere, solo play I’m improvising, and games I play with others.
One thing this does is cure me of FOMO. Not yet in the ‘must buy all the things’ sense; I am not quite at the point where I will not buy a dedicated solo bundle; but I’m no longer buying other games even if they’re just a quid (or a couple of quid).
But now that I have them, I find myself wanting to process them, and having made a good start (I have done reviews, however short, of 40+ games) I want to continue, so I can reduce my mental load.
That means being ruthless. My ‘one topic a month’ project is not going too well; I got side-tracked this month and started on a different game so I’ll have to re-configure everything, and I’ve found a few more games/game styles that I wanted to add, so I’m now looking at September 2027, and I’m not even *trying* to find themes.
But there’s also a tremendous sense of achievement, of taming a mountain of STUFF and turning it into a library of choices; I’m starting to get a feel for which mechanisms work for me; what I like to do when I’m out of brain, what I want to borrow for a longer campaign maybe, how I can augment my practice.
In the long run I think I’ll end up with a pile of solo journalling things along the lines of Froggy Hat, With Iron Teeth or The Disguised Frog - good, wholesome, short fun. (This selection picked by scrolling down the list of reviews); but also hopefully with a pile of games that can form the baseline for longer adventures/more in-depth stories.
In the end I suspect I will end up in a similar space as Geek Gamer in this video – not with the exact resources, but with a similar pattern of I pick a general feel, I find a way to get the story started, pick a ruleset, build a character, and do some worldbuilding in any order.
While it's only fair (and educational) to play each solo game as it is intended (games not intended to be soloed will need amendments anyway) in the end, I see myself taking note what I particularly like about each game and then taking the best bits and making a story from them.
I'm not there yet, but I'm getting closer.
