Chits and giggles: the "Conquest of Paradise" solitaire system

I have an interesting board game in the collection called Conquest of Paradise, a GMT title based on the theme of Polynesian settlement of the South Pacific. Having recently discovered that the second edition rules include a dedicated solitaire system, I decided to give the thing a whirl.

In my cups in the South Pacific.

The game itself revolves around exploration (sending out an explorer to look for island chains), movement (sending out transport canoes to create lines of supply, settlers to found colonies, and war canoes and warriors to menace your rivals), battle (possibly attacking enemy island chains), and building (new villages for your controlled territories and more units in pursuit of further expansion).

What the solitaire system does is provide instruction chits that direct the AI player against you. You do your own player turn then draw a chit to see what your robot rival will do. He may build, he may expand, he may attack, he may defend; and with actions printed on both sides of the chit, a strategy may well manifest itself. There are 15 AI chits in the cup. By the time 13 have been pulled, the human player (that's you) must have gathered a minimum of 30 victory points. If not, you, as that human player, lose ignominiously to a decorated cup.

It sounded like just my kind of game.

First time up, I'm ashamed to say that the decorative cup was victorious. I scored only 11 victory points after a series of 'nope, that's not an island chain!' exploration phases and a vicious and effective final-turn attack which took four island chains and 8 VP off me. I wasn't anywhere close, and saw that I needed to up my game to compete.

Mine are the kind of yellowy-green pieces emanating from the Tongan homeland. They are easy to miss - there aren't many left!

Second game around I had much better luck with my island searches while the decorative cup did not. A freakish run of poorly ordered chit draws for the cup also helped, and this time I was able to score 33 victory points. I think I'm very unlikely to get the advantages I got this time around again, so it might be time to retire and rest on my laurels for a little!

Note the prevalence of yellowy-green pieces this time around due to a very different and ridiculously lucky island chain draw.

Besides being a clever system, the solitaire game is a lot of fun. Note to self: I think it could be quite profitably ported to other environments. I doubt I'll ever get around to doing such ideas justice, but I wouldn't be a real wargamer if I didn't at least contemplate the idea in idle moments...

Anyway, Conquest of Paradise is a good little game already, but the solitaire system is a tidy addition and makes getting the game onto the table an attractive proposition if you have 90 minutes to spare for a bit of Civ-lite play but no buddies available.

Well done to the designer and playtesters.

Commands and Colors: Ancients Solitaire variant.

Reading Bob Cordery of (amongst other things) Wargaming Miscellany's fame's blog post on playing Memoir '44 solo reminded me of a solitaire variant I used to use to play Commands and Colors: Ancients.

The idea was initially inspired by something another fellow had posted (I think it was this, yet can't remember for sure), but I changed it around quite a lot and gave the non-player side certain advantages in the hope that it would become a more challenging 'me versus AI' type of game.  It is of course perfectly possible to play Commands and Colors games by drawing cards as normal and simply playing both sides, but as I do that with Lost Battles I found that I wanted something a little different.

The point of difference in these rules was that the 'AI' did not use the same card deck as me - it used a 'virtual deck', which divided the cards into seven types: left, right, centre, flank, leadership, special and troop.

The 'Virtual Deck'

The non-player turn consisted of me choosing the best three to five cards still in the virtual deck -with certain restrictions in place - and rolling a d10 to see which of the cards would get played.

The number of cards in the select pool depended on morale, which degraded as the non-player army took losses.  The higher the losses the greater the number of cards and the smaller the chance that the AI would get the cards that would be most effective. 

When a card was used it would be crossed off the virtual deck and could not be used again until a 'reshuffle' had occurred, at which point the deck would be reset.  A reshuffle would be caused by the play of 'I am Spartacus' by the player side, or by the virtual player not being able to make a legal card selection.

And that's about it.  I recall that I played about five games of Arausio with it, losing three out of five. In the end I decided it wasn't worth all the extra record keeping, so if I were to revisit it I think I would make or buy a second set of cards to use for the non-player hand to cut out the bookwork.

I would use this second deck to provide the selection pool for the non-player side, using twice as many cards as were officially in the non-player's hand with modifications as seemed sensible.  From that draw 3-5 cards would be selected, and I would most likely relax the restrictions on card types able to be selected.  The card used would be removed from the deck but the others would be put back in and the deck reshuffled.

This would make for less record keeping but at the cost of increasing the amount of shuffling.

So, there we have it.  Any and all comments and questions most welcome!