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.