No board game groups, no friends over for game nights: the social aspect of gaming is suffering. There are ways to share our experiences though. By playing the same games, then comparing and chatting a little online.
1 Player Guild member Joshua Acosta has put together an extensive month-long SoloCon, with suggestions on games to play for every single day in April so that basically you can play alone together all over the world. On most days the suggested games will have the same starting letter. Today was for "H" with Healthy Heart Hospital as the main suggestion. Always nice to get that to the table.
In this game you try to restore a hospital that has suffered mismanagement to its former glory. Every round patients are brought in by ambulance. You then try to cure them, while slowly expanding the hospital with operating rooms, doing research and hiring staff. Your successes will bring you money and prestige, whereas having patients dying will bring losses.
You can play the game cynically by building a morgue and hiring a lawyer, then making sure no one will notice the first few deaths. Or you can focus on improving the quality of your healthcare. Most of the time you'll be making tough triage decisions and racing against the clock to cure people. The ambulance cards are good fun, with short flavour text stating why your hospital is popular or not.
One of the coolest things is that everything is done by drawing cubes from a bag. Patients entering? Draw some cubes, all same colours form a patient - with the amount of cubes indicating the level of illness. For example, three red cubes is a patient with severe cardiac problems. One grey cube is a patient with just slight psychiatric problems. You move them to a ward, where they are replaced by bed tokens with an indication of how ill they are. To cure them, you draw more cubes from the bag. Every right coloured cube will help, black cubes will make things worse. You always know how many cubes of every colour are left in the bag, so you can take informed risks while drawing.
Today, I managed a win - much to my own surprise. Not a very convincing end score, but still.
Joshua's convention can be found on BoardGameGeek: Game'pril Fools 2020 Solo QuarantineCon. Tomorrow is for "I" and another of my personal favourite games, Infection: Humanity's Last Gasp. Or you can play Iron Helm, like Athena did last month. Also - every Friday the bonus game to play is Friday. It's good fun to play some of the suggested games. I can't do this daily, but I'm sure I'll visit again.
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