The way I played most of these games solo was to artificially play only one turn at a time for each side; playing each side's turn based primarily on the current state of the board, rather than long-term strategy. It's not perfect, but works reasonably well.
The thing you have to remember with a game like Ogre, you have to "program" only one unit (the Ogre), so it lends itself well to things like
MOOSE. That's a lot harder to do when there are multiple units on both sides to control. Another good game that is "programmable" is Awful Green Things where you define some basic rules how the Green Things react (die roll to decide which group grows, etc).