Sometimes, you need some buy in to get involved

I was recently talking to a friend who is a casual gamer about what I do and I found myself wondering how do you introduce someone to print-and-play starting from scratch.

The obvious answer to Roll-and-Write. No cutting, no actual construction work. Just print a page and add dice and a pencil. And there are some nifty Roll-and-Write games out there for the printing. I honestly think if someone stopped there, they’d still have a lot of fun.

Heck, if you don’t have access to a printer, you can get some big square graph paper and play games like 30 Rails or High Score/Wurfel Bingo. If you really want to go minimal, you can make it work.

But that wasn’t how I got into PnP. In fact, discovering PnP Roll and Writes and being impressed by what was out there was actually a pretty late stage for me. The jumping on point for me, from going from ‘oh, I’ve made a few PnPs but I’m not really into this stuff’ to ‘yeah, this is a legitimate hobby for me’ was micro card games. Which I made with scissors and sleeving the paper cut outs with regular playing cards so they’d have some heft and the the same backs.

I am a lazy PnPer. The bulk of my projects are nine and eighteen card micro games. Heck, I use a laminator rather than more impressive ways of making cards. (Although, gosh darn it, my cards and tiles are durable!)

However, I think if my start had just printing off sheets, I would have done that for very long and I wouldn’t have gone far exploring PnP games. In fact, years ago, I looked at a couple just print games and then didn’t do anything more for years.

It wasn’t until I put in some effort that I really got interested in print and play. I needed to have some level of actually doing something to get engaged. If I didn’t have that buy in, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.

Roll-and-Write games are great but if I wanted to get someone into PnP, I’d suggest a small project like Bomb Squad #9 or Pocket Landship.