Solo-only games are still something of a rarity in the board game world. Many games come with a solo ‘mode’ or variant, often with separate components to allow you to simulate some kind of opponent, but truly solitaire games just aren’t very common. I don’t see any good reason for this: If you might play a video game by yourself, why not play some kind of board game the same way? It’s probably better for your eyes, at the least.
Conservas is a new solitaire game from designer Scott Almes, best known for the Tiny Epic series of games. It borrows a bit from what I think is the best purely solitaire board game—Coffee Roasters—but applies that to a mechanic that asks you to figure out how long to wait before pulling the metaphorical trigger. It’s appropriately difficult, and the kind of game that will make you want to try again when you fail.
In Conservas, you’re fishing for different species to sell to canning companies to create the Iberian delicacies known by that name, and you start small, with one boat and just a little cash. You then load up the game’s cloth bag with tokens representing anywhere from two to four species along with some water tokens, drawing from the bag to represent your fishing haul on each turn. You’ll decide how many fish to keep and how many to throw back so that you don’t deplete the seas, selling most of your catch for cash, using some fish to buy upgrades, and using cash to add boats to your fleet.
The game comes with a book of 12 ‘months,’ each of which poses a new challenge, with a unique starting arrangement of cash for you and tokens in the bag, and then a different marketplace grid where you’ll place the fish you catch. January is pretty straightforward, with just two species, a simple grid that lets you sell one, two, or three fish at a time, and requirements that after seven rounds you have $40 on hand and at least four tokens of each species still in the bag. After that, it gets more complicated, as you’ll add species, be required to have a certain number of upgrades or boats, and will have to keep the sea well-stocked with all of the species you’re fishing.
In each round, you’ll make multiple draws from the bag, taking out five tokens at a time, making one draw for every boat you have plus one more for the deep sea. When you take out the five tokens, you choose whether to place them on one of your unused boats or on to the deep sea card. Boats have a catch number from one to four, representing the number of tokens you can ‘catch’, with the remainder going back overboard into the sea. You choose which tokens go where, but once you’ve used a boat, it’s done for the round.
When a round ends, you gather all of the fish tokens you caught and choose whether to sell them to the market, finding the next open space in any row of the grid, returning the appropriate tokens to the supply (minus one for the grid), and taking payment; or to trade one or two fish tokens in for an upgrade card. All fish tokens that were on the deep sea card or that you didn’t keep on the boats then go back into the bag, but first, every species with at least two tokens in this group spawns—you count how many tokens you threw back, subtract one, and then add that number of tokens of that species to the bag. Water tokens go back in the bag regardless of where you put them, and often you will strategically choose to ‘catch’ water tokens so you can throw more fish back.
That’s the real crux of the game; buying boats is necessary, adding upgrades is useful, but ultimately this all comes down to deciding how long to wait before you start catching fish en masse. I’ve only won games of Conservas by going, well, conservative, letting the fish stocks build up the first couple of rounds, and then fishing aggressively once I was sure there was enough supply in the bag to avoid a collapse, and to allow me to get the bigger rewards from selling several fish at once rather than selling them one at a time. I’ve found some upgrade cards a little mystifying, because I can’t see how they’d be that useful, but some are clearly helpful and worth the investment, especially earlier in the game. Every play I’ve had, however, came down to making the right call on when to switch over from building up the stock to catching me some fish.
The challenges do increase in difficulty, and every month has a standard goal and a hard one, and there’s even a page in the box that gives you more challenges, so I can’t imagine anyone playing this game enough to exhaust all of the possibilities. I like Conservas but I think I’d get bored of it well before the 50 or so plays it might require to cover all those permutations. I especially love the way it rewards your patience: It’s like the Marshmallow Test, but in board game form. And sure enough, I lost the first few plays, because I assumed I was supposed to catch and sell fish from the start, only to deplete the ocean before the game ended. (Or, once, to end the game one dollar short of the goal, and three sardines shy of the minimum as well.) It’s just a clever solitaire design, and as much as I enjoy the social aspect of board games, I’m not averse to a little me time at the table, either.
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.
