Solo Friday

I’ve gotten Friday to the table a few times in the past week. It is a solitaire game – not a multi-player game with solo rules, but solo from the outset.

Game play

Friday is a deck builder where you play Friday trying to help Robinson Crusoe survive the island. Caruso complete a number of “hazards” by using his skills (the deck) to accumulate combat points. When you start, your deck is full of week cards, primarily with zero or negative combat points — he’s apparently pretty stupid when he arrives.  As you overcome hazards, he learns new skill; however, if you fail to overcome a hazard, he has the opportunity to learn from the experience, and ditch some of the weak cards.

The game is played in three rounds followed by a final showdown with pirates.

In the main game rounds, you pull two hazard cards, choose one, and then discard the other. Then you pull cards to try and overcome the hazard, using your life points if you want to draw additional cards. Each round, the hazards get a little harder to overcome, and each time you go through your deck, you have to add an aging card, which are always bad.

In the final showdown, you go up against two randomly-chosen pirates (which you know at the beginning of the game).

How did it work?

Friday is designed as a single-player game, so I don’t need to talk about how it compares to the multi-player version of the game.

It works really well as a solo game – it’s challenging, but doesn’t feel impossible. Especially if you play by the right rules! (One game, I had forgotten about “selling off” the bad cards when you lose against a hazard, so my deck didn’t get thinned out. It was not pretty!)

This is definitely a game I’ll pull out from time to time when I need a game to myself.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *