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.