I’m drawing a blank for easily portable, non-solo, RPG-like boadgames. I’m sure they exist, but only the giant-box ones are coming to mind. Look for dungeon crawl or rogue-like cardgames.

For pen and paper RPGs, I have a couple of suggestions. None of these are guided stories (except for the first scenario in Runecairn). They are all emergent stories.

Runecairn: Wardensaga is a very well done duet ttRPG - one game master (the warden) and one player. It can also be played solo, or co-op. The delve system is excellent for creating random objectives. Some of the mechanics are explicitly designed for one player, but it’s easy to come up with a workaround that works. My one complaint is that there are some mistakes and oversights in the character creation example that ran me into a wall until I asked the designer on discord.

All of BlackOath Entertainment’s currently supported games (all but the two original ones he sold the rights to) are explicitly designed to be played with or without a GM. Don’t let the death-metal vibes of the website scare you off. Alex is a softy and most of his games don’t reflect the asthetic, beyond some of the art. My personal favorites are Broken Shores and Riftbreakers. Broken Shores leans hard into solo-survivalest vibes, but there’s nothing in the mechanics that forces that. I find it to be an extremely lethal system, but many others have had long running-games - YMMV. Riftbreakers, on the other hand, is the perfect my-first-RPG - you create your character as part of the game/tutorial. It’s meant to feel like a pen-and-paper MMORPG. Travel downsides of Alex’s games are you need all of the dice, and a stack of printed tracking sheets. Both of these have “what do do next” built into the system. Broken Shores is more dealing with the next thing situation you roll. In Riftbreakers, you pick from the mission board you generate when you visit the guildhall.

Then there are the stand-by’s of Ironsworn (definitely with the Delve expansion) or Starforged (Ironsworn in space). They are excellent for building world (or galaxy) and having epic adventures in it. I don’t like the way combat works, but many people do. And they are big books, with a lot to go through in order to get a handle on the games. There is less help for story here. Instead, you pick vows for your character and try to steer the narrative towards your goals, base on positive or negative dice rolls - but you have to wrap the narrative around the rolls.

Maybe Fiasco?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And not just for space combat. Naval combat, too. I don’t have a good answer. I think a single-person fighter dogfights could be done almost the same as person to person tactical ranged combat. Maybe not naval here - tactical Optimist or canoe battle. ;-P Larger ships, though, are either going to be very abstract, if you’re the captain giving orders, or over-zoomed in if one following orders. A partial way around it is to treat the ships as the characters for the fight. Easy for solo. Takes agency away from everyone but the captain in a group. Which is probably realistic, but hardly fun. Even so, you can have the gunner rolling for shots fired, navigator rolling dodge, etc.

I’ve been avoiding (solo) games with ship-to-ship combat, as much as I really want to, because I haven’t felt able to do it justice, yet. I suspect I’m going to end up somewhere between Pirate Borg and Worlds Without Number ship to ship combat, but playing as the ship, once I finally do bite the bullet.