Brandon Waite was packing up after an evening playing board games with his friends when he noticed “1 to 4 players” written on the side of one of the boxes. Just like that, he stumbled onto the idea of playing games by himself. “I had just never heard of that before, or I thought I hadn’t,” he recalls. “But of course, most of us have played [card] solitaire at some point.” Since the release of “Settlers of Catan,” in 1995, the popularity of hobby board games has soared. Last year…
