Sometimes taking the time to play a game is just the sort of rest and recuperation one needs. Sometimes when you need this, there’s nobody else around, making the game options limited.
At a recent board game day in my local community I picked up a single player game. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I figured I’d take a shot. The creator seemed like a local person and the game looked well put together. The game is called Eleventh Beast. This game is set up as a solo monster hunting game set in London in the mid 1700s. I’d only ever “played” pick your own path style single player games, so I wanted to do this one right.
I grabbed the printable map and tokens from the website. I cut out the tokens, grabbed the required dice and a deck of cards with the jokers taken out. I dug up some mood music to accompany my solo game. Note paper at hand, I cracked open the pamphlet and started in on the rules. I also felt some extra ‘flavor’ was in order so I put on some music as a background. I recommend the soundtrack to the old movie “Gothic” if you can come up with it. Really felt like it fit with the game – and ends with a tune declaring that the devil is an Englishman.
The rules made sense, but there wasn’t any… cushion for first timers I guess is a way to say it. I had to just start and figure it out (play fast, make mistakes – a common refrain among our friends). Having said that, it didn’t take long to figure it out. There are only 15ish pages to the whole thing and it’s pretty straightforward once you get started. Rolling dice, placing tokens and pulling cards I worked my way through my first game. I won by defeating the monster with only one wound on my tab.
It is a neat concept. Random card pulling and dice rolls give the action a little bit of unpredictability. It was easy. I’m afraid that I did something wrong as it seemed both shorter and easier than it was described. Part of that might be my lack of detail in the notes department. I could see where the flavor would really work for somebody who wanted to invest in it, but once I figured out what I needed for each step, my notes became a short hand code. It has a level of replay ability, but now that I know what I’m doing it would be a quick hit whenever I wanted to play a solo game. If there were a rule I would change or add, I think it would be a randomization factor for the monster and the player tokens after an attack is resolved. Basically once I’d collected a handful of rumors that turned out to be true (and therefore tools) I stood on the monster and duked it out until I rolled to win. I think pushing the monster and the hunter to random spaces would add to the challenge and allow for a little more strategy.
It was a fun diversion and I’m really glad I took the chance and picked it up. It’s on the shelf, ready to go (with far less prep) for the next time I feel like a solo game.
