"Question for solitaire modern gamers" Topic

In WW2 games, I can work around minefields (never hidden and not that frequent) and snipers (spotting rules) when I play solitaire. In modern and ultramodern conflicts, IED's (booby traps before they were called IED's) and hidden suicide bombers can play a more important role. If any of you have tried playing these conflicts solitaire, what rules have you used or made up to deal with these issues?

Two Hour Wargames would handle all of those events as PEFs, Possible Enemy Forces or as Random Events.

Buy yourself some percentile dice, assign odds % for encounters every turn.

I use cards for activation, and include event cards in as well. If you draw a card that could lead to an event, you then draw a card from a dedicated event deck. This card could be blank (i.e. no event) or an IED, suicide bomber etc.

By including blank cards in an event deck it stops events from happening every turn, and also stops you from knowing exactly when that nasty surprise will occur.

I also add some events that help the team you are playing – that way it is not all doom and gloom with the events.

Two Hour Wargames (as just mentioned above), the PEF is an item/area of interest that you have to check out (get within LOS or within a certain distance). Then you roll to see what it is. Each turn you roll for the PEF, which might move, split, or generate another one in a random location. And if you think a bunker that moves is stupid, you're not looking at it right…your troops thought the bunker was over there, until they got closer and realized the earlier reports were wrong.

One idea I thought about was to have a deck of cards that are either blank or say "danger" on them.

Draw a card, if it's blank all is good.

If it says danger, you draw again and if it's another danger card, something happens.

Here's the trick:
The player gets to react after drawing the first card.

Do you want to risk going hostile and causing a mission failure from being too aggressive, or do you back off and bunker down?

Good idea, especially when the danger is from your own actions – eg you put your troops onto hair trigger and a civilian pops into LOF with potential mission failure result.

I know drawing cards are the fashion nowadays, but my problem with cards is that you always know exactly what is going to happen, just not the order of the happenings. Having to draw a second card might make this more unpredictable -although percentile dice still does the same thing.

I have a pile of event cards. I shuffle them before each game. I darw a number of them randonly then shuffle them in with a number of blank eevent cards. In this way, not only don't you know when an event might occur, but you don't know what exactly the events might me.

If you use duplicate cards, the same event might occur more than once (or not at all). After all, in modern warfare, there is ultimately a finite number of random event that might occur, -unless you accidently shuffle in a dragon card (which has occured in a game BTW).

unless you accidently shuffle in a dragon card (which has occured in a game BTW)

Did you along with what the event deck said?
(I know I would have).

@ Bez: I think we placed a Churchill Crocodile on the board.

there was a "VC solo action" 3 page freebie that used to be on the free wargames site and in the files of the yahoo vietgaming group. covers encountering troop types, incoming and booby traps. works well with most rule sytems for that period. Charlie Company or FNG will work well.
cannot speak for FOF or post nam conflicts.