Pen Pals recycles old mechanics into solid gameplay

Pen Pals from Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games is one of the strategy games, although the name sounds like it could have been one of the word games too. Instead, it’s about making animal pens.

Like every game in the book, it’s a solitaire Roll and Write. The play sheet has six by seven grid with pigs, cows, ducks and sheep sprinkled in the squares and two spaces in each row for possible water bucket placement. At the top has a twelve by two grid of different fence shapes.

You set up the game by rolling to see which of the two water bucket spots you’ll use in each column. After that, you start fencing. The border of the grid is a fence. The first placement has to touch the border and every piece after that has to be part of the same network. You also can’t flip or rotate a shape. 

Choosing the shape of the fence is a little different than the usual R&W formula. The table has two columns for each pip and the two rows are for even and odd. Roll two dice. Pick one for the column and one for the row. You cross off a column after it’s been used. If it’s impossible to pick a column, the dice become wild and you can pick any available column. After twelve turns, game’s over and you figure out your score. 

Animals have to be in a pen with a water bucket to be worth any points. If a pen has only one water bucket, you choose either to score how many different types of animals or how many of one type of animal. The more, the merrier. If there is more than one bucket in a pen, you just score one point per animal.

Pen Pals uses a lot of well trod ideas. Thematically, it reminds me of Raging Bulls. It has a lot in common with 13 Sheep, my go-to for introducing Roll & Writes in the classroom. And, frankly, drawing shapes on a grid practically feels like the default idea for Roll & Writes.

And the tweaks Steve Finn added aren’t that crazy. The even-odd rows, the fact that you can’t rotate or flip shapes and some more unusual shapes aren’t dramatic changes. 

But they are enough to make an interesting decision tree and an engaging game. Pen Pals is a game that keeps me coming back. The short play time makes it easy to come back to and the tough choices make it worth coming back.

It doesn’t remake the wheel. Instead, it is a very good wheel. If you’ve played when a few Roll and Writes, the learning curve is practically a flat line. But that doesn’t change the fact that the game play is good.

Something I keep coming back to when I look at this book is that Steve Finn has made a collection of games that are extremely accessible and very suitable for casual gaming. It is a book for a wide audience.