The Loneliness of the Long Distance Gamer

The source for my 'clever' play on words can be found here. What can I tell you? It seemed like a fun title when I woke up this morning...

This is a boardstate of 7th Continent, a boardgame I recently picked up. I backed this on Kickstarter last year because it came highly recommended from a friend and it had a solo mode. I don't have a regular board gaming group so it was important that I be able to just play this game. Otherwise, I'd've just blown $250 on...nothing.

So here I am, playing the game alone. Actually, I want to be clear about this: I am teaching myself to play. This picture is from my very first game!

And on the upside, learning how to play by myself means that I can make teaching this game an easier experience for other people. Someone has to be the first person to grind through and as a player of Magic, I should just admit that I can appreciate dense rulesets and looking into those rules by myself to figure out how something works.

The downside is that it can feel really lonely. I've realized that I don't mind doing new things if I can do them with someone. It was the upside of learning how to partner dance: even if I screwed up, I didn't have to do it all by myself. The upper upside was that when it went well, there was someone to share it with.

If I wanted to play games all by myself, then I'd just become a championship solitaire player.

So it's challenging for me to do anything by myself-I have plenty of activities that allow me this privilege-and that's in no small part because of the lonely quality. The shame spotlight that comes if/when I find out I've been doing it wrong, well, that's just a bonus.

Ain't brains weird? Even if nobody is around to see me make the mistake, it still feels bad. Instead of 'oh, well that's no big deal because it's easy to fix!'.

As a final note: I lost my first game of 7th Continent. Which was OK! Next time I'll do better. I hope to be able to teach someone else soon!