I own a genuinely embarrassing number of games with well-regarded solo modes, and if you looked at how often I actually play them alone you’d assume I don’t like sitting with my own thoughts. That’s not it. I like solitude fine. What I’ve finally worked out, after a few too many nights of setting up a game specifically to play against a cardboard automa deck, is that I don’t actually want to win against a system I built the spreadsheet for.

That’s not a metaphor, unfortunately, it’s literally my job. I spend my working hours modeling how a system will behave so I can plan around it, and a solo mode is, structurally, exactly that. You’re predicting what the automa will do based on its deck composition and reacting optimally. It is demand planning with a fantasy skin on it, and apparently I have a limit on how many hours a week I want to spend doing demand planning even when the stakes are a plastic dragon instead of a shipment of hiking boots.

What I actually want from a game night is the version of the problem I can’t model, which is Dana deciding to bluff a hand in Sea Salt and Paper that makes no sense given the cards she’s discarded, or Priya taking an unexpected line in Race for the Galaxy that has nothing to do with the “correct” opening I’d have played myself. The unpredictability of another actual person is the whole appeal, the exact thing that’s missing from my day job, where the goal is to make demand as predictable as possible and treat any deviation as an error to explain.

I tried to explain this to Dana once and she said I basically just described “wanting your hobbies to be the opposite of your job,” which, fine, yes, obviously, but I think it’s more specific than that. It’s not that I want games to be chaotic in general. Thunder Road: Vendetta is plenty chaotic solo too, dice everywhere, cars flying off the track, and I still don’t reach for it alone very often. It’s specifically the presence of another person whose choices I can’t fully predict that I’m after, not randomness for its own sake.

So the solo modes sit there, genuinely well-designed, mostly unused, a little bit like a gym membership I keep meaning to use more. I’ll play them when nobody’s around and I want the game itself more than the company, Sleeping Gods alone on a quiet Sunday is one of my actual favorite ways to spend three hours. But if you ask me why I own six games with acclaimed automas and use maybe half of them regularly, the honest answer is that I already spend forty hours a week getting good at predicting a system. I don’t need my evenings to be more of that.