Could a One Player Miniatures Game Work?

So here was one I stumbled onto just recently, a discussion among miniature wargamers as to whether or not a one player miniatures game could work. After thinking about this (when I could think anyway), I do believe it could indeed work and the reason I feel this comes down to one game. That game is Games-Workshop's own Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower/Shadows Over Hammerhal. Let me explain.

From the games I've seen played with it, each quest has a set of rooms that a randomly generated through flipping cards and that rolls determine what event/encounter takes place. This works perfectly for a single-player game, a randomly generated style adventure, featuring enemies, encounters, allies and treasures. The tiles/rooms that get used is a perfect example of how to make the random style dungeon work, as they are all different and some have multiple doors, allowing for more options.

I imagine a set of miniatures that a player could pick from that appeals to them, before picking a class from a collection of options. This way, a player can play a mini they like, while playing them in a class style they like. From here, each class has a small deck of skills they can earn through doing missions and earn special items from treasures collected. The treasures would perhaps be one use items (either one use only or one game only), so as to ensure the player isn't too over powered, but also have extra rules to help ramp up the difficulty if the player felt they were having it too easy. Of course, there are plenty of options for expansions, but also co-op and multiplayer (as an option should players want too or as an add-on if the game got popular enough).

With a general rule set and various options, it could work regardless of the setting. The world could just be humans, a fantasy one with creatures like Elves and Dwarfs, a sci-fi one with aliens and mutants or even a world of anthropomorphic animals or mechanical objects. If you think about it, depending on the franchise, you could set up two types of games. If you were to take a single franchise (so let's say, Dr Who for example), then you could run with a scenery style game (games like the DC/Marvel ones for example) or go with a Shadespire like one which uses two boards and you just move them about to alter the grid. You could have the starters set and add additional miniatures and rules in expansions. On the other hand, if you had various movable game tiles to create random playing fields, you could take a multi-franchise option (so let's say Disney as the example) with an initial starters game and multiple miniature releases like Heroes and Villians from their various franchises.

So is there a market for this type of game? Well, yes. I could certainly see myself and many others playing such a thing. My only concern is more about things like the marketing and demographic. See, as mentioned above, I used a Games-Workshop product. Games-Workshop is a big company and they have both lore and other games to back it up. Take their Shadespire game. I've seen it played and it doesn't really grab me, but it's miniatures look nice (the Skeleton ones look particularly great) and they have rules to be used in Age of Sigmar. As such, it doesn't matter too much if it doesn't really take off as they will still sell based on the miniatures and their compatibility with their other game. However, most other companies or even a kickstarter may have some trouble promoting it and getting it out to those who would be interested. It would also have to have some nice looking miniatures (to help sell it to players who like to paint or those who want to convert, plus they might play it and enjoy it too), but also make it affordable enough, as this is a one player game first and doesn't have the kind of expansive options that other games have, like events and tournaments (as in, justifying the spending of money in a large miniature gaming marketplace). One could expand their game and lore into these areas, but the original game still needs to succeed for this to work.

That said, depending on the games look/feel, I do believe that there is a market for such a game and if you can reach such a product to those players, then it could work.