Pocho & Papa

I’ve been thinking about what drives me to design games, and I keep coming back to one truth: before I’m a designer, I’m a player. And not just any player—I’m someone who loves the quiet challenge of playing against the game itself.
There’s something special about solitaire variants. When you sit down alone with a game you love, you’re not just passing time. You’re having a conversation with the game’s systems, testing yourself against puzzles that emerge from mechanics you thought you knew. It’s intimate in a way that multiplayer sessions, as wonderful as they are, can never quite replicate.
That’s why I’ve created solo variants for three games that have captured my imagination: Okko: Era of the Asagiri, Samurai, and Blitz Bowl. Each one presented its own puzzle—how do you preserve what makes the game sing while creating an opponent that challenges without feeling arbitrary? How do you maintain tension and meaningful decisions when you’re the only human at the table?
For Okko, it was about capturing that narrative tension of the duel between the Demons and their Hunters, lead by the legendary warrior. For Samurai, I needed to preserve the territorial dance and the agony of every placement. And Blitz Bowl? That required creating an AI opponent that felt aggressive and unpredictable, like a real coach trying to outmaneuver you.
These aren’t just mechanical exercises for me. They’re love letters to games that deserve to be played even when you can’t gather a group. They’re born from those nights when I want to inhabit a game world but everyone else is busy or simply sleeping.
If you share this passion—if you’ve ever looked at a favorite game and thought “I wish I could play this solo”—then I hope you’ll find these variants interesting. And I hope they inspire you to see the games on your shelf not as things that need others to come alive, but as puzzles waiting to reveal new dimensions.
Because that’s what being a gamer means to me: always finding new ways to play.