When a game makes me appreciate other games

 I ran across Caterpillars in my never ending search for casual Roll and Writes (NOT to be confused with Canterpillar’s Feast, which is a significantly better casual Roll and Write) And my take away from it is not that Caterpillars is a better game than it seems to be. It’s not. No, it is that it makes me appreciate the light, casual R&Ws that I do enjoy.

 

When you get down to it and stripping away the cute caterpillar pictures away, the game is twelve boxes divided into three equal columns. Each box is labeled with a number one to six, each number showing up twice.

(There are fifteen different play sheets with different layouts of the numbers. In fact, in a multi-player game, everyone uses a different sheet unless you have more than fifteen players)

You roll two dice. Pick one for a box and fill in the other number. You have three one-time special powers to double a die, halve a die or flip a die. When every box is filled in, add up the columns. Throw away the smallest and largest numbers and the middle number is your score.

I think one rule with highlights why I just didn’t find this game engaging is that if you have a role that you simply cannot fill in, you add a zero wherever. As the game goes on, you run out of choices. 

More than that, as someone else pointed out, you have a maximum score of 24. And the choices in order to achieve that are fairly obvious. You still need a lot of luck but the decisions are either obvious or not there.

What Caterpillars really reminds me of is 6 Steps, a very early Roll and Write from 1965. Dry, easy to have null moves, and too many choices are either damage control or meaningless.

Earlier this year, I learned Dice Fishing D6, which I feel confident saying is mechanically worse than Caterpillars. However, it does have a lot of tension combined with extreme brevity of play and some semblance of theme. Those elements keep me entertained, but Caterpillars doesn’t have elements like that.

I also found myself thinking of Reiner Knizia’s Criss Cross, which also consists of only twelve rolls. And yes, as the grid fills up, your choices become more limited. However, the game is all about trying to set up the grid and plan around the fact that choices will get tight. And that is a game that I keep coming back to.

For the last few years, I’ve been regularly learning and playing games by Alexander Shen, who specializes in quirky little fillers. Caterpillars reinforces my view that Shen is a mad genius. Even when I play an Alexander Shen game that I’m convinced is mechanically broken, I’m more engaged than I was by Caterpillars.