Fred Serval’s Red Flag Over Paris was definitely the surprise highlight of 2020 for me. As I sat in quarantine, much like all of you, I was buoyed by the simplicity and elegance of the game. Fortunately we live in a connected age, and I was able to enjoy many sessions of Red Flag with other players on Tabletop Simulator. With each play I kept wondering what it would take to add solitaire play to the game.

The developer for Red Flag Over Paris, Luke Billingsley, approached me with a bare bones solo bot (which we call the Solo Opponent) and asked if I would be interested in helping polish it for inclusion in the game. Of course, that’s what GMT One is all about, so I agreed. The end result is easy to run and takes no more time than a typical player turn, but creates a satisfying narrative and provides a credible opponent. How does it manage this with so little complexity?

The key to Red Flag Over Paris’ Solo Opponent is the asymmetry inherent in the game itself. The Commune player has an advantage in Paris spaces and Public Opinion spaces and initially has a large number of forces available to them. Meanwhile, the Versailles player has an advantage in Fort spaces and Institutional spaces and while they initially have less forces available, they are more robust in the long-term and will win a war of attrition. These small asymmetries were enough to create Solo Opponents that highlighted each faction’s strategy, allowing them to serve as training grounds for a 2-player game and deliver the overarching narrative for each faction.

So how does the Solo Opponent work? First, let’s review a few self-imposed design constraints that we use at GMT One to make sure that we deliver a fun, playable solitaire system:

1. As much as possible, the player should make the same decisions in the Solitaire game as in a multiplayer game. This doesn’t mean that it can’t have additional layers, or changes, but the game should be recognizably the same game if possible. This ensures that the designer’s chosen narrative shines through in both the multiplayer and solitaire games. It also means that we always work with the designer when we design these systems. Even if they have to be dragged in kicking and screaming, right Fred?
2. The solo system’s turn should take the same amount of time (or less) as a regular player’s turn.
3. The system should not require the player to make ‘judgement calls’; this is not the same thing as building in player decisions, where the system explicitly tells a player to choose, but refers to rules like “when in doubt, do what seems best.”
4. Finally, the solo system should be the same (or lower) complexity than the game it accompanies. The solo system for a COIN Series game would be a poor fit for a lunchtime game!

Let’s see how each of these is accomplished in Red Flag Over Paris’ Solo Opponent.

First, only one decision is changed in the Solitaire version of the game. In the 2-player game, each player draws two Objective Cards listing a space that awards a Victory Point to the player that controls it at the end of the round (in addition to a special bonus for controlling their own Objective). In the solitaire game, the player still draws two Objective Cards, but gives one to themselves and one to the Solo Opponent. This means, of course, that the player knows both Objectives. To mitigate this, the player cannot score a VP from the Solo Opponent’s Objective Card, while the Solo Opponent can still score either or both Objectives.

This is a minimal change which keeps the feel of the game intact and only changes the strategy a little. In a normal game, you can generally guess what your Opponent’s Objective might be, although they could be bluffing. That aspect is absent from the solitaire game, but is replaced with a chess match of sorts, trying to make sure that you guarantee winning your Objective while denying the Solo Opponent theirs. Everything else the player does in the Solitaire game is the same as in a 2-player game, so the skill you gain versus the Solo Opponent will translate to your next game against your Grandma.

To make sure that the solo game is just as playable as the 2-player game, the Solo Opponent has to be quick to use. A 2-player game of Red Flag Over Paris generally takes between 30 and 45 minutes, so there’s not a lot of time for the Solo Opponent’s turns. To make this possible, we used a very simple set of instructions – no flow chart here – and made space selection as elegant as possible. Instead of handling exceptions, we allowed for random selection as a failsafe, which eliminated tons of edge cases and made sure that the player always knew what to do – which is another of the principles checked off.

Finally, let’s discuss complexity. The Solo Opponent is 2 pages of rules, and a single player aid card for each faction. The playbook includes a detailed example of play explaining how the Solo Opponent works. Given that Red Flag Over Paris is a high-strategy, low-complexity game, we wanted to make sure that the Solo Opponent was easy to learn and similarly low-complexity. This is not a game where the solitaire system is more complex than the multiplayer game!

We have enjoyed the Solo Opponent for Red Flag Over Paris immensely, and hope you do too. These types of solitaire systems are a craft in their own right, much like game design. As the GMT One team grows, and develops this discipline among our designers, we hope to bring you more and more of these types of solitaire experiences, as well as completely new experiences, in the future.

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