Let me tell you all, the best part about doing the Calliope Summer Travel Series has been finding solo mode variants for all these wonderful games I already own and enjoy. Do I wish we’d thought of this a year ago? Oh yeah. Anyway!
Today we bring to you a solo mode for Everyone Loves a Parade, adapted by our very own Senior Yeoman Ken Franklin. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t play it more than once on my lunch break.
Behold, “I Love A Parade!”
I Love a Parade! - Solo Variant
WHAT YOU NEED:
The three sets of red, yellow, and blue Float pawns
The full set of Color and Decoration dice
The deck of Decoration cards
The deck of Crowd cards
The score track cards
Any one Scoring marker
SUMMARY:
The game takes place over three rounds. Each round, you will reveal a new section of the Parade, assign Decoration cards to the floats to perform actions, then score. After three rounds, check your total score to see how you did!
SETUP
Shuffle and lay out 9 Crowd cards face down in a line with space between each one. Place the score track cards in order above the Crowd cards, with your scoring marker (50 side down) on the 0 space.
SETTING UP A ROUND
First, reveal the three leftmost face down Crowd cards, and place the matching dice on them. Assign one red, one yellow, and one blue float to the newly revealed Crowd cards of your choice. Shuffle all the Decoration cards and deal nine into a face down draw pile. Set aside all other Decoration cards.
PLAYING A ROUND
Draw three of the nine Decoration cards and lay them out face up in front of you. Now, assign each card to a different Crowd card, performing its effect when you place it. Like the regular game, you can choose to perform the card’s action or not. Each card action plays the same except for “Swap two cards,” which now allows you to swap two decorations already placed (since there is no Warehouse). You’ll do this two more times, so that each float has at least 3 cards below it (there may be more thanks to the card actions).
SCORING
You’ll score each float normally (getting points for matching the item and/or color) with one addition: You get an extra 2 points for every decoration that matches the float color. Combine the scores of all three floats to get your round score. Then, set up a new round.
ENDING THE GAME
Once you complete three rounds, the game ends. Your combined scores from the three rounds determine your total:
0-100 = Parade Enthusiast
101-150 = Balloon Handler
151-200 = Float Pro
201-249 = Parade Master
250+ = Grand Marshal
If you give any of these variants a try, be sure to let us know on social media, and use #CalliopeGames so that we’re sure to see it! We might even feature it in an upcoming newsletter.
Happy gaming, Calliope family!