I want more from Roll Estate

 I’ve had Roll Estate in my files for a while. It attracted my attention because it was designed by the moderator of the Flip the Table podcaster, Chris Michaud. The podcast has ended but it was a hoot and still fun to revisit.

Here’s the elevator pitch: Roll Estate is a mashup of Yahtzee and Monopoly. On a slightly more detailed note, it’s Yahtzee with a more interesting play sheet.

The core mechanic is Yahtzee. Five dice. Roll them and you get two rerolls. Mark something off on the play sheet. If you know how to play Yahtzee, you’re 90% there.

The sheet is broken down into two sections: properties and investments. One through six, plus three of a kind and four of a kind are properties. Straights, chance and Yahtzee, those are investments. Full house is nowhere to be found.

Properties are pretty simple. Each category has two to three boxes plus two business. Fill in the boxes just like Yahtzee but each box to the right has to be bigger than the last one. First person to complete a set gets the better business while everyone else gets the other one.

Investments break from the Yahtzee formula a bit. The four railroads are short straights and the value goes up the more you have. There are two long straights and those are multipliers for chance. Yahtzee is a bunch of money.

The game ends when either someone gets their third business or they run out of property boxes. You can X out a box if you can’t fill anything in. Most points wins. There’s a solitaire rule set where Xing out a box is an automatic loss and you have to hit a high score in investments, that number depends on the difficulty level.

Okay. What do I think of Roll Estate? Is it any good?

I think Roll Estate would have made a stronger impression on me if I had played it when it first came out in 2019. But not only have I played a lot of Print and Play Roll and Writes since then, I think that design space in general has had a lot of development in those years as well. (Yes, Covid lockdown helped push that development)

Is Roll Estate more interesting than Yahtzee? Definitely. But does it go far enough? I kept thinking, as I played, that the points were called money and the game would be better if I had something to spend that money on. I also wished for more dice manipulation abilities beyond the two rerolls. 

Is there anything wrong with Roll Estate? No. In fact, I think it succeeds admirably at its goal of being a Yahtzee and Monopoly mashup. It isn’t a blatant copy of Yahtzee. The investment section of the play sheet is the most interesting part and actually pretty engaging.

At the same time, if I wanted to break someone out of Yahtzee, I’d pull out Qwix or That’s Pretty Clever before Roll Estate. There are a lot of accessible Roll and Writes out there. 

I want to like Roll Estate more than I do. I am sure I will occasionally play it. However, I wish it just took its ideas farther.

Some light novel titles won’t fit in subject heading

 One thing Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town by Toshio Rito proves it that some light novels have titles that are way too long.

I came upon it in my never-ending quests for escapist fluff for decompression reading  (And Japanese light novels are a great resource for that) Lloyd Belladonna is the weakest person in his isolated, rural village and goes to the capital to become a soldier in order to make a difference. Of course, his village is the basically at the gateway to the realm of the demon lords and everyone there has been fighting Eldrich abominations for generations so that's just Tuesday for them. Lloyd, even as the weakest person in the village, is still a cross between Superman and Doctor Strange as far as the rest of the world is concerned. And he never twigs to that fact.

A lot of light novels I look at are driven by high concepts, ideas that are fresh, unique and compelling. (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a good example) Suppose is not one of the light novels. The concept of a country bumpkin who comedically and unknowingly overwhelms more sophisticated folks is a saw so old it is literally folklore. Robert E Howard's Breckenridge Elkins is just one of many examples and I'm using it just because its fun to remind people that Conan the Barbarian's creator also wrote funny westerns.

Suppose definitely has some weak elements. The omniscient narrator regularly breaks down the fourth wall to explain the jokes, which is definitely not a strong writing technique. There are times when it feels like Rito was writing a manga script and trying to use a thousand words to convey what would make sense in a single wordless panel. With that said, when the author actually focuses on the story and the characters, Suppose get much better. 

While Lloyd is more overpowered than many examples of the trope, that's not what makes Suppose interesting.  What kept me reading Suppose was the characters. While not particularly deep, everyone is very distinct and the half of the fun that isn't Lloyd doing something ludicrous is watching the different personalities bounce off of each other.

While its hard to argue that Lloyd doesn't have a lot of Mary Sue qualities, he manages to remain sympathetic been his earnest desire to help people and his absolutely crushing low self esteem. That last one is essential to making the story work. We need to be able to believe that Lloyd can’t understand that he is a walking force of nature.

The other characters are also distinct in speech patterns and motivations. Like I said, they aren’t particularly deep but you don’t have any problem mixing them you up. You get to watch personalities ricochet off each other like a box of bouncy balls.

Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town isn’t brilliant but it works as comfort food.

Sondoh has made much better games than True Hero Minigame

When I first started looking into Print and Play games, Robertson Sondoh Jr was a name that came up a lot. They designed a number of light, construction friendly games. 

On a whim, I took a look at True Hero Minigame. And it’s honestly the worst Sondoh game I’ve tried.

Like most of their games, the whole thing is one page. It’s a dungeon crawl where you are managing a hero with two stats, HP and AP. The two have to add up to ten. The dungeon is a preset maze with all the encounters prearranged on a key. Combat consists of subtracting from either HP or AP. The game ends with your death or defeating one of three boss monsters.

It’s a maze with a bit of bookkeeping.

True Hero Minigame is a solveable puzzle but it’s not an interesting puzzle. In fact, I didn’t even print it out. I opened the jpeg and tracked everything on scrap paper. And when I was done, I felt pretty good about not printing it out.

I actively follow Alexander Shen, who makes lots of tiny PnP games and puzzles. The closest thing is compare from Shen is Tiny Maze Things, where you keep track of symbols while doing a maze. Compared to True Hero Minigame, Tiny Maze Things has better mazes, a cleaner system and 200 different mazes.

Not that Tiny Maze Things is brilliant. In fact, I’d say it’s the weakest Shen work I’ll still pull out but only when the brain fog is bad. But it easily beats True Hero Minigame.

The best part of True Hero Minigame is the art. That’s seriously cute.

I don’t want to bash Sobdoh. They with someone with the same last name were making PnP games well before it was cool. And a lot of them capture that old school micro game feel with some definite quirks. But True Hero Minigame just isn’t interesting.

Endless Nightmare - managing a death spiral

Endless Nightmare has been in my ‘ought to try’ list for what seems like forever. It is a free print and play game that has been around for over a decade. More than that, it’s one that doesn’t require any construction whatsoever. You print out the game board and add a bunch of tokens and die. You are ready.

Unlike a lot of games where you just print off a board, Endless Nightmare is not a Roll and Write. No, it’s a Roll and Move! Which I realize is regarded as the laziest design choice possible, one that has been used for many older games based on IP’s where the goal was to shove out a brand name without any consideration for actual gameplay.

With that being said, as Backgammon has clearly proven, there is room to have a good game with Roll and Move. It all comes down to giving you choices. And to be brutally fair, Endless Nightmare is more of a Push Your Luck game but Roll and Move is a good way to explain it. 

In Endless Nightmare, you are trapped in some kind of dreamworld, pursued by a shadow. You will travel through nightmare after nightmare, trying to keep ahead of the shadow. Spoiler, it will inevitably catch you. You are doomed. You are just seeing how long you can put off that doom.

There is actually a decent amount of information on the player board. There is the movement track, where the shadow is chasing you. You also have to track how many nightmares you have survived. You also have two sets of three traits. And you also get to keep track of what nightmare you are in, although you’re going to need a reference sheet to know what its effects are.

The core mechanic is that you decide on an action, which breaks down to either moving or trying to alter a trait. You roll a die and try to roll higher than either how far you want to move or where that trait is. Oh, and you lose ties.

You lose if the shadow catches you or if your courage or sanity drops to zero.

I am not going to go into too much detail, but one of the terribly clever choices the designer made is that your role also is the role for the shadows movement and to determine if horrors or scares increase. Those will drag your sanity or courage down.

I honestly have mixed feelings about the mechanics. The game is all about managing a death spiral, but the game is also an inevitable death spiral. As the game goes on, the difficulty ramps up and your choices mean and less and less because you’re going to fail more and more.

On the other hand, the actual reason to play the game is the theme. The game is dedicated to making you experience an otherworldly horror movie. Every nightmare has some kind of thematic way to make your life even more difficult. And the whole death spiral thing is pretty much locked in by the theme.

Endless Nightmare isn’t a game that I’m going to play on a regular basis. However, it is a game that I can definitely see pulling out at Halloween.

One more person calling Mike Mignolia a genius

After reading Lobster Johnson, which is a weird, little subdivision of the Hellboy-verse, I decided to go back and read the first few Hellboy collections.

And, oh my, it is tasty stuff. People have been saying Mile Mignolia is a genius for years and there is not much I can add to that. (Man, I hope there’s nothing scandalous in his personal life and I’m not praising a real jerk)

What I feel I can bring to the table is a probably delusional sense of historic perspective. I remember Hellboy’s early appearances, mostly due to friends saying ‘Hey! You got to check this out!’ I’m not going to claim my younger self (or possibly current self) had the taste or wisdom to find Hellboy on my own.

One thing I had forgotten was how much of early Hellboy were short stories, scattered among issues of Dark Horse Presents. As someone who didn’t find the stories in order, it wasn’t always easy to figure out what was going on.

But the art was always fascinating, so different from so much of what was out there. We are talking about the era before that particular comic book bubble burst, a world of massive splash pages and gimmick covers. Yes, Mignolia owes a lot to Jack Kirby. Yes, he makes use of light and shadow in a way that would make Robert Wiene nod approvingly. However, the art is also very stylized and distinct when it felt like everyone wanted to be Rob Liefield or Todd McFarlane.

Looking at Hellboy now, it feels like the harbinger of things to come. Comic books have never been only superheroes. Archie Comics and Disney have been making serious bank since the 40s. But in the decades since Hellboy first showed up,  horror and crime and urban fantasy and so many other genres have become more acknowledged in comic books. I’m not saying The Walking Dead wouldn’t exist without Hellboy. I’m just saying Mignolia was ahead of his time.

And the old stories hold up surprisingly well. Mignolia establishes when the stories take place, as opposed to a nebulous present, which helps keep things from feeling unintentionally dated. He mines folklore and older creaters so there’s a foundation to the work. And it’s also just good.

Lobster Johnson was fun but his biggest impact on me was taking me back to Mignolia’s other works.

Archer’s Goon has many layers

While I don’t think you can possibly describe Diana Wynne Jones as a forgotten author, I think you can get away with calling her an under appreciated one. 

Even though I’ve been reading her work for… most of my life? Yeah, most of my life. I am still astonished at how many books she wrote, particularly how many I haven’t read yet. And she influenced so many authors. Wikipedia lists Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Penelope Lively, Robin McKinley, Megan Whalen Turner, Dina Rabinovitch, Neil Gaiman and J.K Rowling as authors who cite her as an influence. (No, I don’t know all of them but there are some huge names on that list)

So it’s safe to safe modern fantasy, particularly urban fantasy, young adult fantasy and children’s fantasy, would look different without her.

Okay, the actual book I just read was Archer’s Goon, which I hadn’t read since around when it came out in paperback. And, honestly, the only thing I really remembered was the twist. 

Spoilers

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Major spoilers 

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Seriously, I’m going to talk about the big reveal 

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Howard Sykes is a thirteen-year-old boy who comes home to find that a huge man with a tiny head sitting in the kitchen, claiming to be from Archer and that he needs two thousand typed words from Howard’s father.

As the story unfolds, we learn that the town is controlled by seven siblings with great, undefined powers. And they are trapped in the town and Howard’s father’s typing is apparently part of it. 

(Neil Gaiman has stated that Archer’s Goon is one of his favorite children’s book he read as an adult. And Sandman is centered around seven dysfunctional siblings. Seriously, how much of the modern fantasy landscape exists because of Jones?!)

The structure of the story has Howard and his family hunt down the different siblings with the help of the goon and learning more about them. Each sibling controls a certain aspect of the town like crime or housing or electricity. And they have the interest and ability to rule the world if they were free.

Okay. Twist time. Big time spoilers.

Howard eventually learns that the goon was lying about working for Archer. He’s actually one of the siblings. And Howard learns that he was adopted and he’s one of the siblings too. He’s just going through his third childhood due to time travel shenanigans.

In fact, the real reason the siblings are trapped in the town in because it is the will of their parents to protect Howard when he is too young to use his powers or know himself.

I cannot emphasize enough how little we learn about what the siblings are. We don’t know where they came from, if they are human, how their powers actually work. We don’t even know if the parents are alive or dead. It’s really quite impressive. 

What Archer’s Goon does do is explore the nature of families. We have Howard’s biological and adopted families, both of which are hot messes. However, his adopted family is loving and ultimately supportive which is something his biological family isn’t good at. 

When Howard is able to see what his adult self was like, the one who set the whole time travel mess in motion for purely selfish reasons, he finds a total jerk who is actually worse than the other siblings. And while it isn’t quite explicitly spelled out, it’s clear that his adopted family is how he can turn out better than that.

I remember liking Archer’s Goon when I first read it back in the 80s. Now, though, I think it’s downright brilliant. It is enthralling character study as well as a commentary about family. It is important to note that the siblings are not depicted as monsters but as dysfunctional and that some of them are trying to do better.

Archer’s Goon may supposed to be a children’s book but I had to be a grownup to appreciate it.

Hyperstar Run and the Art of Button Mashing

 Hyperstar Run is the eighth game by Scott Almes in Button Shy's Simply Solo series, a collection of solitaire games where every game consists of eighteen cards and no other components. And I remember when I was worried there might not be a third game in the series lol

(Transparency Disclosure: I got to be part of the play testing forum Hyperstar Run)

Hyperstar Run is a love letter to an earlier era of video gaming. It is also very much a love letter to button mashing, which might be the same thing. You are trying to complete the last level of a game and you only have four lives to do it. 

Other than your avatar card, which is used to track where you are and how many lives you have left, and two equipment cards, all the cards follow the same format of being a level card. They have a button symbol, two or three challenges that you need button symbols to overcome, and they might have a special power.

You get a hand of the two equipment cards and three level cards. You then create the level by making a line of cards, facedown. The longer the line, the greater the difficulty.  Your goal is to make it the end of the line before you run out of lives.

The core mechanic is simple. You place your avatar at the start of the line, turned to their current number of lives. Cards under the avatar is over are flipped over and stay flipped over. You play cards that match the symbols of one of the challenges on the card to move to the next card. Equipment cards have two symbols. When you can't move any further (and you haven't won), you take your cards back and add the first card in the line to your hand. Move your avatar down a life and start over.

Now, you do not have enough cards to win the game if that was all there was to it. Scott Almes is a clever guy, though, so he's given you some clever tools to work with.

First off, cards that you have completed also count as buttons. You can move them down, so they look like they've been pushed, to use them. They get reset when the level resets. Second, combos. If you use matching symbols to beat a challenge and the next card can be beat with the same matching symbols, you automatically beat that card. If the next card can be beat with the same matching symbols, you can keep on chaining the combo.

Third, some cards have special powers. If you are over a card with a special power, you can flip a card in your hand so its 'facedown' to use that power. You can later discard that card to activate another special power. The special powers let you rearrange the row or make it easier to beat challenges.

While the individual actions in Hyperstar Run are very simple, the actual game comes from figuring how to make them efficient. I particularly like how it is a hand management game where the board is part of the hand you are managing. I've seen it done before but this is still a very good use of the idea.

While the core idea of the game being rearranging the line to be able to maximize combos and buttons is pretty obvious, you still get to experience the sense of discovery as you reveal the cards in the line. You use lives to set up your end run.

I also like how thematic the game feels. While my video game jam is more Animal Crossing or Professor Layton, I do think that Hyperstar Run captures not just the idea of platforming but the idea of button mashing. Which is pretty funny but, hey, its also fun.

My least favorite thing about the game, of all things, is how much table space the row takes up and. since you push buttons down, I don't like to make it two layers of rows. And I admit that that is a pretty petty gripe.

I am solidly in the target demographic for the Simply Solo series. I've enjoyed almost all of them. Hyperstar Run may not be my favorite but I'm happy to have it in the series.

Invisible Cities grows with every reading

 I first read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in 2019, late fall, early winter. At the time, I wrote that I should reread the book every six months and I’d have a new interpretation of the book every time.

And over that next six months: Covid. Lockdown. Remote schooling. And after that, I took on a new career and moved across the country. So, the whole world changed and I changed a bit as well. And it took me four years to go back to Invisible Cities.

The book is a fictional travelogue, Marco Polo describing cities to Kublai Khan. The bulk of the book consists of fifty-five descriptions of cities that Wikipedia describes as poems. Each chapter is bracketed by conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

And this is not an exercise in world building. Not only are the cities not connected together, they feel like exercises in thought experiment, breaking down the concept of place. Calvino has been described as an iconoclast and Invisible Cities can easily be exhibit A for that argument.

One of my favorite sequences in the book is still Polo and Khan discussing whether or not they are real. When, in fact, these versions of them are not real and are fictional constructs. Calvino doesn’t just break the fourth wall. He sets it on fire and dances on the ashes.

When I first was Invisible Cities, I was pulled into its deconstructionist, iconoclast nature. This time, I found myself more focused on each city as a poem, as an individual work of art. I began (digitally) underlining the bits that really struck me. 

I didn’t remember the spiderweb city of Octavia from my first reading. This time, it was the most memorable city for me. Suspended over a vast chasm, the inhabitants have less uncertainty than other people. They know the net will only last so long.

I haven’t read nearly enough Calvino but I think that Invisible Cities is one of his most accessible books.

Guards and Goblins shows the power of change

 I first encountered Guards and Goblins through the 2024 9-Card Design Contest, where it placed first in overall.

It was a tile-laying game where each card was broken down into four quadrants. One guard. one goblin or hobgoblin and two houses. You got a hand of cards. Placement rules: all the cards have to share the same alignment. they had to touch the overall tableau and you could overlap or tuck but you couldn't cover both houses or any goblins. Goblins needed to be touching a group of at least two guards to be defeated and hobgoblins required four. The groups of guards didn't need to be connected but its a good idea. All the goblins and hobgoblins need to be defeated to win.

I thought it was a pleasant little experience but I felt that I wasn't as deep or as interesting as other micro-tile laying games. The original, actually just nine-card version of Orchard being a good example.  And if you go to 18-cards, you have the bigger Orchard family or the Sprawlapolis family or Insurmountable. (Although, once you make the jump to more cards, it makes a big difference. Oh, we will get back to that.) More than that, it really seems that the optimal strategy is to have the guards form one big group, making the game seem semi-solved.

Cut to the published version.

Guards and Goblins is now twenty tiles with four hobgoblins and four special buildings with specific placement rules and special powers. And, yes, the degree this improves the game is remarkable.

I said we'd get back to the value of having more cards. Having eleven more cards and having a different array of cards, not just doubling up, seriously changes the decision tree. Compared to the nine-card version, the decisions are wider and the special buildings create situations that are completely new.

Frankly, I have to consider it a different game. 

I am still exploring the new Guards and Goblins. It may be also semi-solvable but I think it will take a lot more work to achieve that point. The contest entry is effectively a brain fog activity but the full game feels like a game. Honestly, I still think the Sprawlopolis family and the Orchard family are better but the full Guards and Goblins is a good addition to the surprisingly large world of micro tile laying games.

Stone Age Survival is an RPG disguised as a R&W

 Stone Age Survival is a free Print and Play Roll and Write about trying to stay alive during the prehistoric era. It’s also, for an all intents and purposes, a solitaire RPG system.

You start off by creating your Paleolithic player character. You assign 1, 2, and 3 to either strength, agility, or intelligence. You then pick out three skills, one from three different categories. Starting health and starting food is figured out from your stats. 

The ancient wilderness that you are trying to survive in is represented by a 5 x 5 grid with your home camp being in the middle. You actually fill out the entire grid before you start playing, populating it with predators and hazardous areas and potential hunting and gathering areas and landmarks.

Your goal is to survive for 15 days. Each day, you move to a new area and resolve whatever kind of area it is. And there are plenty of tables for you to deal with. An exploration table to determine any travel difficulties, predator tables to figure out what you’re going to fight, food tables to figure out if you are hunting or gathering, hazard tables, and landmark tables.

You use up a food every day. If you run out of food, then you start running out of hit points. If you die before the end of 15 days, you lose.

No, it’s not like I haven’t seen roll and write games that are functionally role-playing games. In fact, that can be pretty common as far as dungeon crawls or similar adventure games are concerned. However, what is striking about Stone Age Survival is that you could throw away the grid and add a game master and some more players and you would have a perfectly functional RPG experience.

I’m being completely serious. You have a classic tri-stat character. You have systems for combat, other forms of conflict resolution, and a skill system. Honest, I have seen official systems that have less meat.

Now, I’m not sure how good an experience it would be. A good group can make any system work, but I’m not sure how much help they would get from this system. The game also gives you no reason not to MinMax, not that that is a good or bad thing.

As for the actual gameplay itself, I honestly found it very repetitive. I actually quite like that you map out the board ahead of time because then you can actually make some functional choices. Otherwise, you are entering an area blind and just have to react to it, having the game play itself. 

The experience reminded me of playing game book from the 80s, only with less narrative and better mechanics.

I enjoyed Stone Age Survival but more an intellectual exercise than as a game. Since it is a free, one page game, that’s a win for me. However, I would only recommend it as a curiosity.

My February Gaming

 While my February gaming wasn’t particularly packed with learning new games, looking back at it, there was a focus on slightly larger micro games. As I have written about in the past, 18 cards is where a micro game has enough design space to flex its muscles.

I learned:

Ham Fisted

This Mars Vacation

Pocket Puffins

Confusing Lands

Roll and Safari

Guards and Goblins (published version)

I also revisited Pentaquark, a game I hadn’t liked that much the first time. It had been long enough since my last play and I had grown enough as a solitaire gamer that it was practically like playing it for the first time. And a better experience this time.

Ham Fisted, Pocket Puffins, Confusing Lands and Guards and Goblins were also games that crossed the line between nano game and micro game. If you are used to huge, table sprawling games, there probably doesn’t feel like much of a difference. And I know that major reason that 18 cards is a format for micro games is because that is one sheet at many professional printers.

Still, I realized that there are a lot more 18 card games that I would pull out to play with other gamers compared to nano games. And every game I learned in February is a game that I can see myself going back to.

The best game I learned was Confusing Lands, which has entered into regular rotation and seems likely to stay there. It is definitely a game that I would recommend.

My February PnP

 February, for one reason or another, ended up being a heavy month for PnP crafting. I made a decent number of games.

I made:

Pentaquark (demo version)

This Mars Vacation (quarter size)

Trap Construction Corp (quarter size)

Ham Fisted

The Starspeaker

Pocket Puffins

Confusing Lands

Roll and Safari

Stone Age Survival

Woodland Craft

Spooky Woods puzzle cards

Hyperstar Run (demo copy)

13 Sheep

Guards and Goblins (published version)

Lands of Adventure (prototype)

Magic Rabbit (lockdown special)

Quite a few of those games would count as a ‘big’ build in a different month. While 18 cards is definitely a micro game, it also feels like a watershed point. It’s a big enough design space that a game has room to have some meat.

Not a guarantee of meat, by any means. Oh no. Ted Sturgeon’s Rule that 90% of anything is crud (or a number of other words) still applies. And no knocking nano games. And Roll and Writes are their own universe of design space.

Actually, a good way to put it is that I’m much more likely to pull out an 18-card game to play with someone than a game with fewer cards. Again, Roll and Writes are their own beast.

I have to admit that a lot of my crafting I’m February was fueled by arts and crafts decompression. But at the same time, I ended up playing almost everything I made, and the stuff that I didn’t is on the shortlist for March.

In a lot of ways, February reminded me why PnP is important.