What's this?
See my previous post for background information on Solo Hunt or Gather with a Ghost Player Automa.
What I tried
General Rules for Solo Play
- All tiles remain face-up
- Use the 2-3 player village
- The ghost characters stay in the village, with the inactive character pulled to the front (closer to the player)
- Tiles collected by the ghost player are placed face up in the village, and then put in a face-down stack when they are scored.
- The ghost player has no carrying limitations.
- Both player and ghost player start with 2 points on each track.
- The ghost player goes first, beginning the turn by pulling the gatherer to the front
Ghost Player turn
The automa’s turn has been routinized, always beginning and ending in the same way, with the only decision tree being in the middle.
Experimenting with a more realistic (difficult for the player) placement of tiles on the board.
- Switch characters
- pull the character not used on the previous turn to the front
- Score or Draw a Tile as that character
- If the active character (hunter or gatherer) has an un-scored tile that is within the top 2 positions, score it, and continue scoring until that character has no more to score.
- Or, If there is a face-up tile on the board of the correct type, collect it.
- Otherwise, draw a tile. If it is the correct type for the active character, collect it. If it is not, put it face-up on the board, as far from the village as possible while touching one of the ghost player’s claimed spaces. If no spaces claimed then adjacent to the village.
- Claim a space
- the space should be as close to a space claimed by the human player as possible, and secondarily as close to the village as possible
Gameplay Notes
I had some bad luck, but through the use of events to manipulate the market was able to keep the ghost players scoring down a bit. Also because the ghost doesn’t choose which character to use each turn, I was able to time it so that they were unable to score a large collection of animals before the game ended. As it was, the raw score was 39 to 38, and I only got 2 points from goals. If they had scored those animals it would have been a tie at 41 points each.
The new placement rules work well. The claimed space going down every single turn makes movement tight. And putting those face-up tiles as far away as possible meant there was at least one turn I was unable to move far enough to poach a deer.
Card notes
Tall tree: remove from solo game
