If it feels like every new board game now ships with a solo mode, you're not imagining it. A sweeping new academic study of more than 100,000 games has found that solo play has become one of the defining features of modern board game design, ranking as the third most common mechanism in games released since 2020.
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See how it worksThe research, titled "From Monopoly to Ark Nova: An Empirical and Cultural History of Modern Board Game Design (1930-2025)", was carried out by the LudIA research group at the European University Miguel de Cervantes with a colleague from the University of Valladolid, and published in the journal Simulation & Gaming. The team pulled metadata for 104,640 titles from BoardGameGeek and tracked how design has shifted across nearly a century.
The headline for solo players: in games from 2020 to 2025, solo play sat third for prevalence, behind only dice rolling and hand management. As BoardGameWire reports, cooperative play has climbed too, appearing in 3.7 per cent of recent games, up from 2.9 per cent in the 2010s, having never cracked the top ten mechanisms in the preceding eight decades.
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Start organising for freeThere's more here for design nerds. The number of distinct mechanisms in the hobby grew from 69 in the 1930s to 192 in the 2020s, and annual output exploded, with more than 38,000 titles logged in the 2010s alone. One thing has barely budged: the median maximum player count has stayed at four for the entire history of the hobby. "One result that I find particularly interesting is the stability of the median maximum player count," said co-author Azael Herrero.
The study takes its name from Ark Nova, the zoo-building heavyweight that has become a poster child for meaty games with a first-class solo mode. If your shelf is heavy on games you can play alone on a quiet evening and still bring to game night, the data now backs up what you already knew.
Sources: Simulation & Gaming | BoardGameWire
