Roll and Safari lives in a dog-eat-dog world

 Roll and Safari is a Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write for one to any number of players. At the moment, it’s free to download. 

 

The idea is that you are driving around the Savana in a jeep on a photo safari. The actual game play is drawing a path in a hex grid. Every game is going to have some level of abstraction and Roll and Safari doesn’t do badly theme-wise for one sheet of paper.

The core idea is that you roll three dice each turn. You pick one for the direction the jeep is going to go, one to determine the distance and one to determine what direction the camera is pointing when you reach your endpoint.

Any animal you land on gets scared away and is out of the game for good. You start out with a camera that can go three hexes but as the game continues, you can get bonuses to expand that. And, other than the first round, each round has a specific animal that you get to mark down twice per sighting.

Each animal track has bonuses if you check off enough boxes. These are things like treating a distance or direction die as wild or getting bonus watering holes (which get you points) or camera lenses. 

The game ends after thirteen rounds. You add up the number of animals you’ve seen, along with watering holes and unused bonuses and that’s your score. 

Roll and Safari’s roll for direction and distance is not a new mechanic for Roll and Writes, although it isn’t filling in a grid which I have now seen more times than I can remember. The mechanics fit the theme pretty well and the game is easy to understand.

The biggest problem that Roll and Safari has is that it exists in the same word as Voyages. Voyages uses the same core mechanic of rolling for distance and direction as Roll and Safari but is a better, deeper, richer game. Honestly, it’s a top tier R&W and Roll and Safari can’t help but suffer in comparison.

With that said, on its own, Roll and Safari is a clean, streamlined game. It has a family friendly theme and would probably work with youngish kids. And it’s free, not that Voyages is pricy.

If you are looking for only the best in your games or if you are only playing with ‘serious’ gamers, then, yeah, Voyagers is what you are looking for. But if you are looking for variety or something for a younger audience, Roll and Safari isn’t a bad game to add to the library.