I used to say, fairly often and with more confidence than I’d earned, that solo board gaming was a contradiction, that the entire appeal of the hobby was sitting across from someone and reading their face while they decided what to do, and a game designed to be played alone was just a puzzle wearing a board game’s clothes. I said this enough times at game night that Theo has, more than once, brought it up specifically to needle me about it now.

What actually changed my mind was a five hour flight and a copy of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs I’d bought mostly out of curiosity, half expecting to hate it and prove my own point. I did not hate it. Somewhere over, I want to say, Kansas, deep into a scenario, trying to figure out the exact card sequence that would let me clear a room without getting swarmed, I realized I’d been fully absorbed for close to forty minutes without once thinking about the fact that nobody else was playing with me. That was the thing I’d always assumed was impossible, being genuinely engaged by a game with no one across the table.

I think what I’d actually been criticizing, in hindsight, wasn’t solo games specifically, it was games that felt like a chore to solve alone, which is a real category and does exist, and I’d unfairly generalized from a couple of bad experiences years back into a whole rule I never questioned again. The specific puzzle-solving pleasure of Buttons & Bugs, watching a tight little scenario finally click into an order that works, turned out to scratch something close to but not identical to what a good group session scratches. Not a replacement. A different thing that I’d refused to let be its own thing.

I’ve since bought two more small solo games, mostly for travel, and I catch myself being a little embarrassed each time I recommend one to someone after years of dismissing the whole category out loud, in public, on this very site more than once probably. I don’t think changing your mind about something you were loudly wrong about needs a bigger lesson attached to it than just, well, I was wrong, the evidence showed up on a cramped flight, and I updated. That’s most of what actually happens when people change their minds, less dramatic than we like to make it sound afterward.