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Comment by qaid | Hacker News Reader

As an only child, I used to spend my summers playing board games by myself. It started with monopoly (which my babysitter introduced me to) and carried over to chess and beyond.

For many of the games, I ended up assigning one player to be “me” and different personalities to “the other players,” who each had different styles. I also tried my best to stop “myself” from cheating by forgetting what cards “everyone else” had. After all, games are not fun when someone is cheating.

Thankfully, my days of playing board games by myself is long over. However, I still have a tendency to take a long time to calculate my next move since I’m always trying to factor in what everyone else is doing.

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I figured a bunch of only children would reply here.

I spent 4-5 years playing Avalon Hill wargames alone (Panzer Blitz, Squad Leader, 1776, etc.), trying to play each side's strategy as accurately as I could. I don't know if it made me a better tactician but it certainly threw open the gates of historical curiosity to the point that 12-year-old me knew more about WWII than my parents.

I'm also an only child and I'm thankful that I was raised in an area with plenty of kids. I never missed having real siblings. (Future) Parents of this world remember this when choosing a place to live, specially nowadays that only childs are becoming the norm.

Aside from being in that area, did you wish you had a sibling growing up? Selfishly my partner and I want to stick with a single child but for his sake we are thinking of having another.

Please stop thinking of your choice as selfish.

I never wished I had real siblings, I had 2 "brothers" and an older "sister" living next doors while a kid. Despite my personal anecdata, I would prefer to have more than one child. Being a single child has more negatives than positives. Parents always expect/demand more and can't avoid to treat them as scarce.

Another only child here. Solitaire, a Game Boy, and later Minesweeper, Hearts, and Freecell were some of my single-player entertainment. It never occurred to me to play a board game by myself; major props to your young imagination!

Never occurred to me to play a board game solo as a kid either, and I used to bring my NES controller and a Super Mario Brothers 3 Strategy Guide full of maps to my grandmother's to pretend to play through the game.

But I design board games now, and boy do I ever play my own games against myself now. I'll play up to 4 players solo for playtesting purposes, no problem. So far the only types of games that it's seemed pretty impossible to do this with are social deduction and party games.

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