Solo: the Automa
Play Grand Austria Hotel alone against the Automa, the solo variant by Mauro Gibertoni: setup, levels, the Automa cards, its hotel and its scoring.
Short tag: [Automa]. A solo variant by Mauro Gibertoni (rules revision 1.0, January 2018), published as a free download on the game’s BoardGameGeek files page. You play by the normal rules; the Automa follows a few simple rules and never needs planning. Later printings of Let’s Waltz! ship an updated official version; this page follows the 2018 rules.
Components
The base game plus the 20 Automa cards (printed from the download).
Setup
- Set up a normal 2-player game.
- The Automa gets no dishes or drinks, no money marker, no starting rooms and no starting guest.
- Normal and Hard: take every game-end Staff card out of the deck, shuffle them and put 5 face down by the Automa’s hotel without looking — its private Staff deck. Shuffle the rest back.
- Shuffle the Automa cards by its hotel. Choose the start player at random.
Levels
| Level | Icons in brackets on the Automa cards | Staff icons |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | ignored | ignored |
| Normal | ignored | used |
| Hard | used | used |
How the Automa plays
- It needs no money for guests or rooms.
- It serves its guests at once, without items, and puts them straight into a room — no room needs preparing first.
- It never passes.
- Emperor bonuses and penalties do not affect it.
- It scores nothing for completed blue groups.
An Automa turn
At the start of each Automa turn draw an Automa card (two each round); reshuffle the deck when it runs out. Its top half says what it takes:
- Guest — the first icon is the colour of the guest it takes. Several fit: the one worth the most points; still tied: the first in the direction of the hand icon. A gray guest means the guest worth most points, any colour.
- Die — the second icon is the die it takes. Two dice shown: from the space with more dice (ties: hand direction). MAX: from the space with the most dice. MIN: from the space with the fewest.
No guest or die matches the card, or its hotel has no free space of the guest’s colour? Discard the card and draw another.
The Automa’s hotel
When it takes a guest it scores the guest’s points and places an occupied Room tile — no other reward. It pays nothing and ignores adjacency and the bottom-left start:
| Guest | Where the room goes |
|---|---|
| Blue, red or yellow | fill rows bottom to top, each left to right |
| Green | fill columns right to left, each bottom to top |
A room on a space with printed points scores them, as for you.
The bottom half of the card
- Emperor — advance the Automa the number of steps shown for the current round.
- Politics — if a marker is shown next to the current round, put an Automa disk on that card (A, B or C) and score it, unless it already has one there.
- Staff — a Staff icon gives it a card from the Staff deck; a game-end Staff icon gives it the top card of its private deck. (Ignored on Easy.)
Emperor scoring
The Automa scores its Emperor space like a player, then moves back as normal; bonuses and penalties do not apply.
Final scoring
The Automa adds to the points it collected during play its occupied rooms (1 to 4 by row) and its game-end Staff cards. Beat it to win.