Category Archives: Solitaire Systems

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Two-Handing Robin Hood; or, How to Rob Your Own Carriage

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A Gest of Robin Hood has been out for nearly two months now, and both Fred and I are very pleased with how it has been received so far. It has been especially gratifying to see people enjoying the game with a wide range of friends and family, including young children and non-wargamers. One of our aims with the game was to make a relatively accessible entry point with a family-friendly theme, and it seems like it has been a resounding success in this regard. However, we know that not everybody is able to find a gaming partner all the time, and so I wanted to put together this short guide to playing the game “two-handed solo” (playing both sides to the best of your ability).

Like other COIN and Irregular Conflict Series games, A Gest of Robin Hood is already fairly well-suited to multi-handed play, as the cards are all open information (when drawn) and it is relatively easy to formulate a strategy for each side based just on the current board state. However, unlike most of these other games, A Gest of Robin Hood does feature a small amount of hidden information, and I’ve come up with a few tricks for handling these when playing by yourself. In collaboration with British Way designer Stephen Rangazas, Fred and I have also designed a set of “heroic and villainous personas”, which you can use to add some additional variation for either solo or two-player games.  

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Learning Fields of Fire

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Over the years, Fields of Fire has proved to be quite tricky to learn for a lot of people. As a solitaire wargame, the usual method of a finding an experienced opponent, or even a club of experienced players, to guide you through learning this new, complex system is a non-starter. This leaves you at the mercy of the Internet and its hidden pearls of wisdom amongst an awful lot of noise.

For Fields of Fire Deluxe, we address this in a few different ways:

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The 3rd Annual GMT One Holiday Gift: A CDG Solo Playsheet for Manoeuvre

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It’s become a bit of an annual tradition at GMT for the fine folks at GMT One to cook up something as an end of year Christmas gift to our solo players. In 2021, that gift was a solitaire bot for Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter. In 2022, we made a CDG Solo System playsheet for the Empire of the Sun family of games. This year we are excited to share a CDG Solo System playsheet for Manoeuvre!

Manoeuvre is one of my favorite under-the-radar games that GMT publishes. It has an approachable playtime of around 45 minutes, so it’s easy to get to the table, and rewards careful play and clever hand management. The asymmetric factions and decks of cards provide lots of variety, but the core system is tight and chess-like. I also really appreciate that while the combat system has enough chrome to make battles satisfying, it does so without obscuring the elegance of the underlying mechanisms.

Because I love the game so much, I wanted to find a way to make it even more approachable and likely to be played. The idea hit me to use the CDG Solo System to replicate some of the fog of war in the hands of cards. But there is one core problem with that approach: the CDG Solo System assumes you are playing one card per turn (for the most part) and in Manoeuvre, the entire conceit of the game is that you can play up to your entire hand in a turn. Is it possible to find a way to modify the CDG Solo System to accommodate this style of play? It turns out that it is!

For those familiar with the CDG Solo System, the main change to the gameplay is that when rolling to determine which slot to play from, all of the cards in that slot become available for play during the turn for any legal purpose. This means that multiple unit and HQ cards could be played in a single combat, for example. Then, I added two things to the usual flow of the CDG Solo System:

  1. During the Discard and Draw phases, you can select any cards to be discarded and replaced from the draw deck.
  2. If you choose not to play a card during your turn (i.e. you move and do not initiate combat, nor restore a unit), you may move any one card from one slot to another (or from the top of the draw deck to any other slot).

Taken together, these give the feel of building your hand and shedding less useful cards. The tension of the game stays intact: do you respond now while you have a sub-optimal attack, or cycle cards and try to get that extra unit card or leader to boost your chances?

CDG Solo System Playsheet for Manoeuvre (click image for link to PDF)

We hope you have a very Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, and that this playsheet brings you some enjoyment in 2024!

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Designing Congress of Vienna’s Solitaire Game, Part 2 of 2: The French Bot During the Government & War Phases

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Introduction: We explained in the previous article how CoV’s Solitaire Game’s Initial and Diplomacy Phases utilize Stuka Joe’s marvelous Card Driven Games’ Solo Method (CDGSM) adapted for Congress of Vienna: Designing the Congress of Vienna Solitaire Game, Part 1of 2: Diplomacy and The French Bot | Inside GMT blog.  In this article we continue this exposition with the Government and War Phases.

For a wealth of information and wide-range of InsideGMT articles, including the latest status of this game’s graphics development at the talented hands of Terry Leeds, see: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna     

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Designing the Congress of Vienna Solitaire Game, Part 1of 2: Diplomacy and The French Bot

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Introduction #1 from Congress of Vienna Assistant Designer & Editor Fred Schachter: I’ve had the fun and pleasure of helping Designer Frank Esparrago on his journey, now our journey, to bringing his labor of love CoV game vision from dream into reality.

This GMT P-500 game is now undergoing a wonderful transformation from playtest into production graphics thanks to the talents of Terry Leeds.  For the latest status of Terry’s efforts and a host of Congress of Vienna game material see: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna .

But for all the content readers will find within GMT’s site for the game; there’ll be a dearth of current material relevant to Congress of Vienna’s Solitaire Version and Bots.  Those rules and Bots are to the credit of CoV Team members: initially Jim Gutt and David Illanes and more recently David Schoellhamer, who is architect of those Bots’ latest rendition.  Well done guys!

With that, I’ll turn further introductory honors to Frank…

Introduction #2 From Congress of Vienna designer Frank Esparrago: Previous InsideGMT articles explain how the CoV Team agreed to offer a version for solitaire play. However, Developer Dick Sauer and I did not have sufficient experience to address this creative task fully and properly. Our first approach was to consider emulating the Churchill game’s Bots. Alas, they were too simplistic for a CoV solitaire game which needed to deliver the kind of interesting, uncertain, fun to play gaming elements we sought and, above all, to put pressure on a human player and make attaining victory an entertaining challenge.

Consequently, we increased our development team with new members having experience in designing a solitaire game. As Fred mentioned, these CoV solo game developers were Jim Gutt and David Illanes.  They created the game’s inaugural French Bot. Their tenacity, highly critical minds, detailed knowledge of the Congress of Vienna  game system, as well as game design orthodoxy in general; allowed them to build a series of summary tables (in Excel or Word). This enabled me to convert those guidelines into suitable Flowcharts or rules which can be easily understood by future players.

In Spain, both myself and Ignacio Badal commenced efforts to create a 2-player CoV version. This would have similar concepts to what Jim and his United States team derived. We had to change a few game mechanics of this highly interactive multiplayer game to make it into a viable 2-player contest!

Once those design concepts were fixed; we realized if we created a good 2-player Congress of Vienna game; designing a derivative solo game could be easier than by advancing directly from 4-players to just a single “human” player! That worked out to be a good intermediary step.  Serendipity!

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Resolving Combat in Bear Trap’s Solitaire System

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When I began developing Bear Trap, it was already a tight and competitive two-player game, much like its spiritual ancestor Sekigahara. However, the designer P.R. Daniels had ambitions to go beyond this and include a solitaire mode that would allow a single player to enjoy the game by themself. Bear Trap is a block game with a lot of hidden information, which makes designing a solitaire mode quite challenging, but Paul has come up with some clever systems to facilitate this. In this article, I want to look closely at just one aspect of Bear Trap’s solitaire mode: how combat is resolved, which highlights several of the core design principles that underlie it. For an introduction to the combat system in Bear Trap, you can read Paul’s earlier InsideGMT article here.

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The Eight Games of Vijayanagara: The Bots Have Risen

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The base game of Vijayanagara is a raucous three-player event set in medieval India. But we all know the feeling of not having the right player count in a given moment to pull a particular game off the shelf. Or maybe a player has to leave the game early, or you prefer to do your interactive history exploration alone over a cup of tea, savoring the decisions at precisely the right pace.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you may be pleased to hear that we have been very hard at work on cutting, sanding, and polishing three Non-Player Factions (bots), capable of running each of the player Factions in the game when you need them to step in. The bots are card-driven, similar to the Arjuna system for Gandhi, the Tru’ng system for Fire in the Lake, and the upcoming Calixto system for Cuba Libre, but streamlined and tailored for Vijayanagara.

Chief among the design goals for the bots was to retain the overarching narrative of the game in any configuration, while also seeking to create a streamlined interaction. After a lot of great playtesting efforts from the community and continual improvements, we are feeling pretty excited about where things stand.

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Inside GMT One: CDG Solo System Print & Play Kit

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GMT has long been a supporter of Stuka Joe’s CDG Solo system, which we highlighted in an insideGMT article way back in 2016. So, making an official GMT version that supports our CDGs and CDG players just made sense. When GMT One head Jason Carr reached out to Stuka Joe to see if he would like to see an official version made for GMT, it was immediately obvious that it was a great idea. While our main goal in developing this official set of rules and playsheets was to make the system more accessible and available to a wider audience, it we also wanted to give the system back to the community. So, we are proud and excited to reveal our Print and Play kit for the GMT CDG Solo System, but more on that in a minute.

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A Hitler’s Reich Axis Bot Variant for a More Historical Balkans’ Experience

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Introduction by Hiter’s Reich Co-Designer Fred Schachter: One of the fun aspects of our beloved hobby is the ability to “tinker” with a game to suit our perception of history or to simply introduce a new fun element into play. Here’s such an alternative for Hitler’s Reich: A Card Conquest Series Game from Rich Kimmel.

Having knowledge of the game and its solo Bot designed by the talented Vez Arponin should enhance readers’ appreciation of Rich’s article. For that background, please consult GMT Games – Hitler’s Reich. With that, “take it away Rich!”.

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A Holiday Gift from GMT One: Free Print-and-Play Solo Opponent for Fort Sumter

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It’s been a whole year of GMT One, and to say thank you to our customers and supporters, we have a Holiday Gift for you: a free print-and-play Solo Opponent for Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter. 

During the pandemic, I spent many nights working on the Solo Opponent for Fred Serval’s Red Flag Over Paris, which uses the same game system as Fort Sumter. As we were wrapping up, I realized that the underlying approach could easily be ported to Fort Sumter, so I asked Gene if we could do the Solo Opponent as a free giveaway. He was quite enthusiastic, so I got to work. It turned out to be a bit more work than I expected – as most Solitaire rulesets seem to be – but it was also a lot of fun to dissect Mark’s game.