Spaghetti Spaceships: 14 Aug 16 Edition

Here are three new spaceship miniatures.  As with last week, these are works in progress photos as I have yet to finish detailing the ships or paint their flight stands.  The lead ship has about 80% of its detailing complete.

I built these ships along with last week's vessel in order to test the rewrite of my solo spaceship game Greater Space Battles (GSB).  Honestly, it sucks.  Like every other space game I've ever played, it's slow and ponderous made even more boring by the fact that it is solitaire.  I had fun when I first wrote and released GSB four years ago but I think the enjoyment came from nostalgia: I had not played a tabletop game in more than a decade before those first play tests.

Is the solo table-top space battle game the holy grail, the unified field theory of solitaire gaming?  Can it ever be made fun?  Eighty percent of the solo rules I've created, regardless of genre, have ended up failing once the play test starts.  One game however, my 1/600 jet rules, has consistently given me fun experiences.  So I know fun solo gaming can be had.  I'll just have to keep trying to crack the space battle puzzle.