My April R&W

 Okay, thanks to Radoslaw Ignatov, April ended up being another month of trying out new-to-me Roll and Writes. Eventually, I am sure I will take a break from learning R&Ws. However, I haven’t burnt out yet.

I’d already tried  Some Kind of Genius from Ignatov. I added Mixture, Alpakaland, Elektrico, Pointree sand Jurassic Hunt to the list. I have already written about some of them and I’ll eventually write about the rest so I don’t feel the need to write about them individually. 

But my general impression of Ignatov‘a work is that he has made a a very solid collection of games that are very well suited for casual gamers. He designed for them to be playable over video conferencing or even via forum, including space to record all the rolls. This does mean that certain dice manipulation mechanics like rerolls or dice flipping aren’t available. And I do like those mechanics but I appreciate the design choices.

The other R&W I learned in April was Fast Train to Miyajama from the fourth R&W design contest. It’s a cute little game that I can honestly see having mass market appeal.

And writing about it led me to this idea: Some Roll and Writes are dice games and some are board games that use pen and paper.  This isn’t some amazing epyphy. It’s just a good way describe something I’ve been thinking about since, like, 2017.

Now, there is absolutely no line dividing the two groups. The gray area is pretty much the whole area. And this is absolutely not a quality judgement. I am not saying that ‘board’ games are better than ‘dice’ games. The former might be more complicated but even that feels like a gross generalization.

I do know some Roll and Writes got their design start as board games. Corinth is an obvious example and I understand Welcome to Dino World started out as a tile-laying design. However, I don’t think that’s a good definition either. 

While I think that it’s a matter of intuition and intent, the real conclusion I’ve come to is that Roll and Write isn’t a mechanic or a genre. It’s a format and you can do a lot of things with that format. You can’t do everything with it but there’s a lot more than just Yahtzee!