Solo Play: Little Circuses

While I didn’t get to all of our games with solo variants while my husband was away, I decided to finish after he got back. For this post, I pulled out a new acquisition, Little Circuses.

In this game, each player builds their own circus with attractions in an attempt to entertain crowds and collect sets of different-colored attractions. you do this by buying attraction tiles such as a strong man, balloon vendor, elephant or giraffe, and contortionist. Then you move your spotlight around, guiding the visitors to the attractions you want them to see.

A huge note – the first edition of this game has a lot of mistakes. In the rulebook, the “clown” and “elephant” icons are mixed up, so I played this game a couple times thinking it was much harder than it needed to be. Those icons are also wrong on some of the star attraction cards. The rulebook has no explanation of the tiles with two colors, and my bleacher cards are all the same color, even though the rules refer to bleacher cards matching the color of the player score markers.

The solo-play variant isn’t much different from the multi-player game except you can only use the blue side of the star attraction cards, not the red side. This makes sense because the red side has a bit more player interaction.

In the solo play game, you are trying to get the highest score you can, and will get a ranking according to the score chart in the rule book.

I played five times in the last couple of days, including two games before I found the errata online. Every time I was in the “Nice Try” range. I’m just not sure how to get a higher score!

All in all, though, I found the solo play game to be fun. It’s a puzzle to try and figure out which tiles are the most valuable. Do you go for sets of colors? Or the ones with the powers you want to use most? Some combination of both? I’d definitely pull this one out again.