1 player podcast by Albert Hernandez and Julius Besser

This week, Julius talks about the game Oros.  In this game, you play a good raising lands so that your followers can build you powerful temples atop volcanoes!

This time around we talk about Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth.  It's a light point-and-click style adventure that will feel familiar to folks that played Cantaloop or video games like Leisure Suit Larry, Monkey Island and all those old games.  This game feels like those but quite a bit lighter.

This week sporty Albert and Sporty Julius talk about sports... sports games that is!  We look at the various sports games we know and enjoy.

This week we learn about a new cozy game about books.  More specifically, storing books all over your house.  As a gamer, this surely sounds familiar.

This week Julius introduces us to the game Emerald Skulls.  It's a gambling game for 1 to 6 feisty goblins!

This week Julius talks about Maki Masters, a game about preparing the best sushi recipes by carefully arranging ingredients on the preparation mat.  This is basically a tile laying game in which you are trying to arrange the ingredients to complete recipes.  However, this game brings some really nice looking components, especially if you have the deluxified edition.

This week I tell Julius all about managing a finishing and canning business while trying to keep ecological balance in Conservas.  It's a bag-building game by Scott Almes in which you are catching fish to sell in the market.  While doing this, you need to be careful and not overfish or risk unbalancing the ecosystem and losing the game.

This week we return to Popular Mechanics.  This week we look at games that are sequels to other games.

This week Julius shares One Hit Heroes with us.  It's a game about fighting super-villains that are supposedly way more powerful than the heroes.  It's a co-operative game that can be played solo or multi-handed solo.

This week I tell Julius all about the game SpaceCorp, by John Butterfield and published by GMT.  This game is played in three phases in which you explore colonize, the inner Solar System, then the outer Solar System and finally the nearby galaxies.  The game is based on the Galactican series by Ejner Fulsang.

This week Julius tells us about a game as big as a school bus!  Endeavor is a game about exploring the world's oceans solo, cooperatively or competitively.  It's a big game that sounds like lots of fun and very thematic.

This week I talk with Mike & Olga Rimer of Caravel games.  They have been making video game content for years and years in the excellent D.R.O.D. series (Deadly Rooms of Death).  A few years ago, they released a solo puzzle game called Twisty Little Passages. Now they have Time Fenix coming to Kickstarter in a month or so.  We talk about all their games and then have a bit of a chat about tariffs and how they are trying to deal with so much uncertainty.

This week Julius and I talk about dexterity games.  It's not a category you see often when talking about solo games, but there are a few fun ones we've tried (mostly).

This week Julius and I talk about the smaller version of Terraforming Mars.  Well, one of the smaller versions.  The game is the very lovely  love-child of Terraforming Mars & Race for the Galaxy, Ares Expedition.  In this game, you are working to make Mars a habitable planet by managing the temperature & oxygen levels while raising oceans.  The theme is straight out of Terraforming Mars.  However, you do it by choosing actions and playing cards simultaneously, just like Race for the Galaxy.

This week, we talk about Harvest, the farming game from Keymaster Games, publishers of PARKS.  In this game, you are trying to farm and harvest your fields as often as possible.  It's a worker placement that can be soloed by playing against Gairy, the Dairy cow.

This week Julius takes us back to the table with Lewis & Clark.  Go on a slow boat ride accoss the North American continent to explore lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and explore the yet unclaimed Pacific Northwest.  That is, not yet taken from the native populations of the are.

This week Julius and I explore a RPG about exploring a giant castle.  Giant doesn't do this castle justice though.  This is a world inside a castle so immense there are seas in it.  The castle is filled with room so large there are cities and villages in them.  You will wander around exploring and fighting Rooks, massive creatures made of stonework.  When you defeat one, you can gain powerful magic stones, Rookstones.

This week Julius and I talk about looooong games.  These are games that take 3 or more hours to play!  Serioulsy, these are the kind of games I wish I could play more often but find it hard to get out on the table... <sigh>

This week, Julius introduces Fit to Print the newspaper layout game.  It actually sounds like a fun game with a timer.  In this game, you are buying the best stories and laying out on your newspaper to make the most captivating paper in town!  It sounds a big goofy but it also sounds really fun.

This week I tell Julius and the audience all about Free Ride, the train game by Friedemann Friese and published by Rio Grande Games.  This is a fun pick-up and deliver game with quick turns that includes a solo challenge.  Hop aboard and hear all about the game and what I think.

This week Julius tells us about the small game Welcome to Reckoning.  This 1 player game by Mike Heiman set in a wild wild west with cosmic horrors.  Gotta love those cosmic horrors.

This week we talk about a Vital Lacerda big-box game on wine making.  The game is the 2016 release of Vinhos: Deluxe Edition.  It's a fun game that lets produce wine, compete in wine fairs, sell and export.  All this in an effort to become the pre-eminent wine producer of Portugal.  It's a pretty neat game with an interesting theme but maybe too big for me.

This week, we look at a year of gaming.  Well, sorta.  We look at games that have a year in them or somehow use the flow of time in them.  It was harder than expected, but we found a few games that do have a pretty decent sense of time passing.

This week Julius and I look at a game about growing magic herbs and plants in a communal wizard's hedge.  Position your helper sprites to help you get the most plants from this shared garden.  This is an interesting game of area control in which, each turn, you are placing plant patches to trigger a variety of powers and increase your control over the garden.  This game's solo experience closely mimics the multiplayer game using a bot that doesn't really add any time to the play.  In fact, because of player analysis paralysis, it may be faster.

Julius and I talk about Bot Factory but Vital Lacerda.  Mostly Julius describes the game and I talk about how much it reminds me of Kanban and how I want to play either of those two games.  Bot Factory is based on Kanban in both the theme of managing a factory and the mechanics which are simplified quite a bit without making it a simple game at all.

This week we look back at a classic co-op game, Castle Panic. Monsters have decided to attach your castle in a clearing surrounded by dangerous woods.  Waves of monsters charge the castle.  Fortunately, the clever design makes it hard for the monsters to get at your castle and your highly trained warriors (knights, archers and fighters defend the castle), each specializing in combat on a certain type of terrain.  This is a pretty simple and accessible tower defense game that has had a relatively recent art upgrade and continues to be fun, if a bit simple.

This week tells us about a Monster High-ish game called Mythic Mischief.  In it, you play a group of monster kids in school, trying to cause mischief in the library and get one of the rival cliques in trouble.  It's a head-to-head sportsball type game of out-maneuvering your opponent's team members so they get caught by the library's Tomekeeper.  The game also features a solo mode that sounds pretty fun to me.  You can get one of two different base games, each with a different set of factions as well as stand-alone expansions, each consisting of a new faction.

This week we talk about the game Aleph Null by Tony Boydell and published by Capstone Games.  The art is by Alex Leigh and music by Nicholas O'Neill.  I did not include music as I mentioned I might do, primarily because I didn't see it available on-line for public consumption.

This week Julius and and daughter join this week to talk about the very lovely Wild Gardens.  This is a game about foraging for natural ingredients to put into your delicious recipes. It's a beautiful game that reminds of Studio Ghibli animations - think Totoro. 

This week I talk about a small solo RPG called Anamnesis.  This is a game about forgetting your past and then rediscovering who you are.  I found it hard to start because you begin with no information and you are making it all up as you go along!  That even goes for the setting!  I found as I played, the story comes together nicely and I have had a really good time every game I've played.

This game seems to come up again and again and it's for good reason.  Pandemic is a classic games in line with the likes of Monopoly, Clue or Scrabble.  Fight off diseases ravaging the world in an effort to save humanity.  This game has inspired variants, legacy games and made cooperative games popular.  It occurs to me that we didn't credit the game.  It was designed by Matt Leacock and originally published by Z-Man games.

While still struggling slightly (very slightly), Julius and family recorded an episode about tragic games.  That's right.  These week we look at games that are overall about sad events.  No tragedy here though, it's a very fun episode!

This week we talk about Deck of Wonders, which currently has an expansion out on Kickstarter.  I'd hope to get this episode out with plenty of time for listeners to decide if they want to back this.  Saddly, Hurricane Helene set back my production schedule and the Kickstarter ends in just a couple of days.

I am still struggling with outdoor home internet. Julius and family picked up my slack and recorded an episode. This week's game is the sequel to The Search for Planet X.

This week again no episode. I was affected by Hurricane Helene. My family is fine but we are with out power going on four days now. It will be a few weeks before I can get the currently recorded episode out. 

This week Julius tells us all about climbing behemothic monsters, also known as Leviathans.  In this game you are trying to remove crystals from Leviathans all while they fight back.  It's a cooperative game that can be played solo and uses a book with 17 diferrent monsters, each its own board.  It is actually a pretty unique sounding game and I enjoyed learning about it.

This week I talk about a gamebook from Fervent Workshop called What Lies Beneath.  It was designed by Chris Scaffidi and the art is by Jason Glover, who has also designed quite a few games of his own.

This week Julius and I are back with a Popular Mechanics episode.  The mechanic this time around is "animals".  That is, we are talking about games with animals in them and feature animals.

This week it's not actually episode 350 but just a filler to let you know things are busy around here.  We'll be back in a few weeks.  In the meantime, don't forget to enter in the Ragemore contest!

This week a sick Albert tells Julius all about Hallertau.  It's a really interesting worker placement farming game by Uwe Rosenberg.  Yes another one!  As per usual, this is a fun game with lots interesting choices, cool mechanics and more bits that fit in a normal sized box.

In which we resolve a long standing contest for The Last Lighthouse and then discuss the solitaire legacy game Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom.  This is such a neat sounding game that Julius convinced me to order a copy!  That rarely happens.

This week Julius tells us about the Lookout Games city building game, NEOM.  It's a game about building a futuristic city but really it's a tile drafting game like 7 Wonders but with tile placement.

This week we talk about the (cozy?) game of animal crime fighting.  This game is set in the Edwardian world of Sherlock Holmes.  You are a mixed group of animals trying to solve animal crimes happening in and around Baker Street.  It's a fun little game that is more akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure book than anything else.

Julius is back!  To celebrate, we talk about rondel games, a subject he is much more familiar with than I.  We explore a few games that feature Rondels.  As usual, I try to stretch that definition a bit.

This week we finish ranking the Simply Solo games designed by Scott Almes and published by Button Shy Games.  Find out which are my favorite top 3 of the six games.

This week I look at the Simply Solo series from Button Shy Games.  This is a collection of solo games all designed by Scott Almes, of many other games fame (Tiny Epic series, Warp's Edge and many more).  In this two-part show, I rank the games from least to most favorite and focus on the last 3. Don't forget to enter the contest and win a copy of The Last Lighthouse.

This week I bring Lord the Rings the Card Game from Fantasy Flight back to the table.  This is a game that honestly, is often on the table.  It's by far my most played game.  I enjoy the deck construction and fun adventures of this game.  It's still a great time to get into the game too.

This week Julius is out so I have my very own dream quest as I talk about the game In Dreams by Jamie Thul & Mike Berg.  It's an interesting little solo journaling game using a deck of unique cards and a little bit of AI magic.

This week Julius and I go out on a limb and talk about miniatures gaming.  Turns out this isn't a subject we really know much about so we struggle to come up with some good examples of it.  Still, I think the episode is useful if you are curious about miniatures gaming and want to find out a bit about what that is.

This week Julius is back (but staying far far away from my teleporter).  He talks about being lost in space in the game Unsettled in which you are exploring new planets while lost in space.  It's a big big episode about a big big game!

This week Julius and I return to talk, yet again, about Sentinels of the Multiverse.  This time we change things up a bit and talk about new content.  First, we talk about the Cauldron expansion for the  original editions.  Then we talk about the Definitive Edition and our thoughts on that.

This week I'm talking about another solo RPG.  It's Star Trek Captain's Log by Modiphius Games.  Due to some technical issues, I ended up recording alone.  Hopefully any problems are resolved before the next recording.  Sorry Julius!

This week Julius is out so I have a special guest.  A podcast listener, ChrisOkay, comes on the show to talk me into playing Expedition to Newdale.  The game will eventually get played by me but that is probably years away.  Technically, I did play it a couple of times when I first got it... one solo and one with my son.  Chris thinks I should play it sooner and really get it on the table.  So, he tells me all about the game.  I have to admit, it sure sounds fun!

This week Julius and I discuss set collection solo games.  We each bring three games that we think include set collection in the mechanics and are interesting solo games.  Just a footnote here... I am right about Agricola.  The first set of three sheep gets you a point.  After that, every set of two sheep gets you a point!  If you disagree, just let me know.

I accidentally used Podbeans AI processing.  Let's see how it sounds.. the description below is from their's.

This week's game is Dungeon Pages, a roll and write by Jasons Greeno & Tagmire.  It's a roll and write dungeon crawl game.  It was initially released once over the course of a year.  Each week you would get a new dungeon page.  Effectively a hero with their set of five dungeons to explore.  Each of those pages is a quick campaign game that can be played in under 30 minutes!

This week Julius and I talk about Bullet ♥︎ and, really, Bullet ★. These games are in the style of Bullet Hell video games were bullets are flying all over the place in overwhelming quantities.  It's a really fast playing simultaneous play game with a timer.  Julius find the timer optional and I appreciate that because it makes the game sound more fun to me.

This week's episode I tell Julius all about the game Red Cathedral, in which you are tasked with helping to build St. Basil's Cathedral in Russia.  It's an interesting game with beautiful artwork and a very simple AI for the solo gamer.  Fortunately, I did most of the talking this week.  Julius's audio was a bit garbled and I was unable to clean it up.

This week Julius and I look at Mathy and try to figure out if the subject adds up for us.  We had some conversations I thought were interesting in what makes or doesn't make a mathy game while presenting six different examples.

This week Julius and I revisit a classic realtime game... Escape: The Curse of the Temple, in which you Indiana Jones your way out of a cursed temple.  Hurry though, you only have 10 minutes!

This week Julius and I talk about Flamecraft, a fun worker placement-ish game of running around being a good dragon.  It is actually worker placement but for me it felt more like running around doing errands than like placing workers.

This week Julius and I look at Cyberion, the latest Oniverse game my Shadi Torbey.  It's a cool game about fighting the Devious Cog whose trying to destroy your factory.  We really like the Oniverse and send almost an hour discussing this game!

This week we learn how to start a new zoo!  Julius tells us about New York Zoo, a game in which you are trying to build a new zoo with animals and rides.  It's a rondel game with polyominoes by Uwe Rosenberg and pretty family friendly.

This week's popular mechanics episode is a bit unorthodox.  Instead of looking at a single mechanic, we talk about mechanics (or game stuff) that caught our attention in 2023.

This week I go solo and talk about an RPG called Wreck This Deck.  The title says it all, this is a game in which you get to alter and craft on a deck of playing cards all while trapping demons, doing readings and casting spells.   Best of all, you are altering cards!

This week I'm out, as well as next week, so Julius and family fill in to talk about a solo poker game!

This week's episode, I talk about a small game called Age of Civilization, in which you can play through the rise and fall of empires in about 30 minutes.  It's a fun little worker placement game with lots of choices and lots of variability.  The entire show collapses at the end when my headphones run out of battery.

This week Julius shares a game he can't stop gushing about.  It's Endangered, the cooperative game about saving endangered species.  It's a neat little compact game with an interesting theme and nice artwork. 

Poor Julius sprained his wrist pretty badly and has been struggling with shuffling cards.  This week we brainstorm games that we can play without having to do all that shuffling.

This week's game is Pericle: The Gathering Darkness.  It's a fantasy adventure board game set in a world that reminds me of ancient Rome or Greece.  It is app driven to simulate playing with a game master and really does feel a lot more like playing an RPG than it feels like playing a boardgame.  I very much have enjoyed playing the game and think it is a pretty unique experience.

This week Julius and I revisit the game PAX by Bernd Eisenstein and published by Irongames.  This game is a small, fast playing drafting game that reminds me (but not Julius) of 7 Wonders.

Oops, I forgot to attach the episode to the 1st post.

This week we talk about the Ravensburger game by Propero Hall, Wonder Woman: Challenge of the Amazons.  This is a very affordable, family friendly co-operative game that isn't intended for solo but can work if you don't mind making a few compromises.

This week Julius and I talk past each other as I try to describe games that are good if you want more enjoyment from the game than just the time at the table, or as I call it, the Game Between the Game.  Not all is in agreement here though so come listen and decide how you feel about this topic.  Let us know what you think about the topic.  Do you agree with either of us?

This week I tell Julius all about the GMT Games title Banish the Snakes.  You play as St. Patrick or some of the other saints that worked to convert Ireland to Christianity as the Roman Empire and Roman Britain and collapsed.  This is a really interesting historical title that plays very similarly to a Pandemic but with the complexity taken up a notch or two.

This week Julius tells us about Skytear Horde.  A cooperative card game not too unlike M:tG.  In it you play cards to cast spells and summon allies.  A rift has torn the sky open and from that tear emerges a horde of demons, more or less one at a time in a pretty orderly fashion to defeat you!  You can play solo or cooperatively to defeat this horde and their boss!

This week I preset a cool little 2-player dueling game which also includes solo rules.  The game is set in an alternate history earth around the time (and place) of Genghis Khan.

This week Julius and I talk about the relatively new game, Skoventyr.  This was designed by Morten Monrad Pederson and produced by Shadi Torbey (of Oniverse fame).  This is a light but fun game of running around the forest trying to escape from the devil, or Gamle Erik as he is known in Danish folklore.

This week Julius and I manage to fit a bunch of games into a small 30 minute space.  This Popular Mechanics episode is about polyomino games with their funny shaped pieces.  Think Tetris.

This week, Julius tells us about the cooperative game, Keep the Heroes Out!, in which, well, you are trying to keep heroes out of your dungeon.  You play as one of a number of dungeon denizens.  You'll go is to keep the wave after wave of pesky humans out of your dungeon by killing them, all while trying to do some other, scenario based thingy.   It's a super-cute looking game with a neat theme.  From all Julius tells us, it was very nicely implemented and lots of fun.  Check it out!

In a galaxy far, far away you get to be a bounty hunter after your next target.  Nothing will stop you though many enemies will try to get in your way.  Notorious is a solo journalling RPG about being a bounty hunter in a hardscrabble world.

Unable to record this week, Julius's family picks up my slack by talking about the Adventures of Robin Hood.  This is an adventure game in which players cooperatively, or one player controlling multiple heroes, explores Sherwood Forrest as Robin Hood and his Merry Men (in tights). Their description of it and the look of it reminds me a lot of the excellent video game Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood.

This week Julius tells us about the solo game Wreckland Run. It's a Mad Max kinda world and you are racing around collecting spare parts and building up your arsenal of a car in a short 7 game campaign game.  This is part of the Solo Heroes series from Renegade Games.  See what Julius thinks and how he ranks it against the rest.  Hint:  this one doesn't even rank for him!

This week Julius and I look at games with modular boards.  It's one of my favorite "mechanics" in a game.  I really like games where the setup is different each round and it affects how the game plays out.  The bigger the impact, the better!

I was out with COVID so Julius and family picked up my slack and revisited a cool little game called PARKS.  Visit the National Parks in a very pretty game with an interesting solo bot.  But do they like it?

This week Julius and I look at the charming little trick taking game For Northwood!.  It's a fun and interesting game in a tiny package.

This week I was lost in time.  Julius and family picked up my slack and took an anachronistic look at a Jurrasic Park legacy game Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar.  It sounds like a fun family experience and a good solo game.

I've always been curious about this game but have never tried it.  Julius does me the curteousy of telling me all about how it works.  It sounds like a fun, light and puzzling experience but not as cold as being up on the side of a mountain.

This episode comes out 12 years to the day after the 1st podcast!  Huzzah!  Just to liven things up a bit, Julius and I decided to do something a bit different (just a bit) and make this popular mechanics episode about Kickstarter and Kickstarter games.  Julius had some interesting points about Kickstarter as a tool and platform and I especially enjoyed looking through all the various items I've backed before and seeing how far things have come.

This week Julius and I get Space Hulk: Death Angel back to the table.  This is the classic game of dying a brutal death and just watching your team of Space Marines get decimated by a bunch of alien scum.  This is a cooperative game published by Fantasy Flight games and is based on Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K universe.  It's  a well loved solo game that is now long out of print but come see it fairs after a very long hiatus on the 1 Player Podcast.

This week Julius and I talk about Legacy of Yu, from Shem Phillips and Garphill Games.  This is part of their Ancients Anthology collection by the same designer.  Unlike those games, this game is made for solitaire play only. It's a resource management game with a legacy aspect to it.  You will play until you have either won seven games or lost seven games.

This week we revisit a mechanic Julius quite likes in the form of a game called Black Angel.  Honestly though, we don't talk about that mechanic much at all.  The mechanic in question is a scrolling board that we encountered in Solenia about a year ago or so.  Black Angel uses that same mechanic and a whole lot more in a bigger more complex package with much more vibracity!

This week we look at a classic fantasy gamebook from the 90s, or more accurately, we look at a few books in the Fabled Lands series.  These are some rather unique gamebooks in that they are open ended and you are able to explore freely, travelling on a map in each book.  You can even travel between the books and progress through them as your character levels up.  There are seven books in the series, plus one traditional style gamebook and even a novella.  Best of all, they are still available and actually pretty inexpensively that's to Print on Demand publishing.

This week we are back to Popular Mechanics.  Well, sort of. I'm back but Julius is on vacation so I have a special guest. It's the return of Deborah from Geek Gamers!  She chose the episode's mechanic and it led to some interesting discussions and a small bit of confusion.  There's a bit of audio issues.. sorry about that.  Fortunately, it doesn't linger around very long at all.

Let's take a look at Merchants of the Dark Road.  This is a 1-4 player competitive game that includes an automa for solo play.  It's a beautiful looking game with lots of shiny components (if you get the deluxe version) but got mixed feedback from our Julius.

This week we talk about the vertical scrolling, space shoot-em up game, The Battle at Kemble's Cascade.  Don't worry though.  This isn't a video game but a board game with a theme of a space shooter video game.  It's a pretty unique concept that does a great job of simulating a video game.  It's a lot of fun but it does have a few small issues.

This week Julius talks about the Wyrd Miniatures game, Vagrantsong.  The publisher is known for making miniatures games but this one uses plastic standies instead.  This is a tactical combat game with a campaign.  Think Gloomhaven or Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion but without quite the oomph of those games.

This week Julius tells me all about the game Resist!.  This is a game about the Spanish maquis during the Spanish Revolution.  You take control of a number of maquis and complete missions by fighting the defenders at the location.  This is a deck-building game, though come to think of it, I didn't get the impression there is a lot of deck building involved but maybe I just missed that.  Anyway, it's a cool looking game with really nice art that also sounds very fun.

This week Julius and I finally return to our Popular Mechanic series.  In this brief episode, we talk about games that are "one and done".   Basically you play the game once and then can move on from that game, never to return... EVER.  Maybe.