Friday is a solo board game designed by Friedemann Friese (designer of Power Grid)
with an amusing concept: You take the role of Friday, a native to an island on which some fool called Robinson Crusoe has been shipwrecked. To go back to your untroubled life, you need to help Crusoe survive the perils of the island, as well as two pirate ships that happen by.

It is mainly a card game and a cleverly designed one at that. One deck is your starting cards, each with a value on it from -1 to 2. Then you have a deck of “ageing” cards, which have various adverse effects and modifiers. Each time you reshuffle your main deck, you add an ageing card to it. Run out of ageing cards, and Crusoe dies of old age. That is a loss!

Finally, you have a deck of challenges. When you draw a challenge, it shows how many cards you draw from your main deck and the total you need to reach or exceed. So, for instance, swimming out to the wreck requires only one card and a total of 0. If you succeed at the challenge, you add the card to your main deck, for each then has unique abilities to aid you.

You may spend life points – from a starting pool – to draw additional cards. Alternatively, if you fail to reach the target, you lose the difference in life points, but you can also remove cards from your deck, which is useful for getting rid of unwanted cards, such as the Aging cards and other penalty cards.

Once you have gone through the challenge deck once, you reshuffle those cards you did not defeat and go through it twice more. The difficulty of the challenges increases each time, but with luck, your main deck is better now. Once you have played the deck three times, it is time to face both pirates.

The pirates work as more difficult challenges. You randomly select two to face at the beginning of the game, so you know what you are up about, and often they have special rules that alter how you approach them.

Once you help Crusoe defeat the pirates, you win the game!

This is a delightful game. It plays quickly – most likely in the range of 15-25 minutes – but there are plenty of intriguing decisions to make. Do I push my luck spending life to draw more cards? Or do I accept the loss and use the opportunity to lose some cards?

I have played a couple of dozen games of it so far – mostly losing it – and it keeps engaging me. It has four difficulty levels, so once the basic game becomes too easy, you can make some minor adjustments to the deck or starting life totals to provide a more challenging experience.

I expect a time will come where I have solved the game and playing it is no longer as fun. But as an inexpensive way of diverting us for a half-hour or so, it is high on my list of enjoyable solitaire games.

There is enough randomness in the game so that, even if I think I understand how it plays, the draw of the cards can still wreck my plans. That is a feature that bothers me in longer games – it does not matter for this one, because of the game’s short playing time.

I do not find the decisions “brain-burning”, so it always proceeds at a rapid pace. Getting the best combination of cards – and choosing the best abilities from the challenge deck to take – makes for engaging game play.

Overall, this has proved to be a great companion during this year. There are other games I play when I want a longer, more involved experience, but when I just want to have a little fun puzzle-solving, I return to Friday. Highly recommended!