Roll and Reanimate does not make me feel lively

I’m just going to start out by saying that I did not enjoy Roll and Reanimate. 

And a good chunk of that lack of enjoyment had to do with rules ambiguities. Even worse, I was able to figure out quite a bit of what I think the designer wanted to tell me because I have played a lot of roll and write games. I think that it would have been an even worse experience for someone who wasn’t familiar with these kinds of mechanics.

The idea behind the game is that you are trying to create your own Frankenstein monster. Or, as the rules, describe your potential creation.  Franken-dice monster. I’m a dad. I dig dad jokes. Works for me.

The core of the game is dice drafting. Each player has their own pool of six dice and there is one Franken-die for the whole group. You can roll your own pool of dice multiple times, but you have to set aside at least one die in your laboratory each roll. And the first player to scream ‘Eureka’ gets to draft the Franken-die but they can’t draft any more dice.

There are three main parts of the play sheet: a mob track, the monster and the coil. Each body part on the monster has six boxes, each part with a specific die pip. 

You can spend three or more of the same pip to work on a body part. A run of three dice lets you improve the power coil. You can also discard dice to adjust other dice, reduce decomposition (which I’m not going to go into but makes sense as a mechanic) or erase check marks on the mob track.

If you complete the monster, you get a chance each turn to bring it to life. Roll all six dice and get at least the number of sixes on the coil to win.

The mob track basically makes your life difficult. Every unused die you have and every turn you don’t adds to the coil checks off boxes in the track. As the track fills up, you lose dice when you try to bring your monster to life. And when the track completely fills, you lose.

At least, I am very sure that’s how the game plays. I found the rules a bit murky and I have a lot of practice reading rules. And I also often read prototype rules that aren’t the final version for publication and they are usually better than this.

I also played the game solitaire and that’s where the real confusion kicked in. When playing solitaire, you are to mark off the mob space on the number of the Franken-die. Does that mean you mark off spaces irregularly and how does that affect the penalty? 

You also take a two mob box penalty if you use the Frankenstein-die but that makes sense. After all, there’s no competition for it. That rule also applies to large group play (but large group play doesn’t have the other penalty)

Not only is the first penalty confusing, it also doesn’t seem balanced. It’s not like playing solitaire makes the game any easier, other than no competition for the Franken-die and the other penalty accounts for that.

Honestly, Roll and Reanimate has the bones of a good game. However, it desperately needs at least a good copy editor to straighten out the rules and make them clear.

To add to my displeasure, it was a Kickstarter project, meaning I did pay for it. Not much but I am a _lot_ more forgiving of a free download or a contest entry. The moment you ask me to treat a download as a piece of merchandise, I expect the standards of a piece of merchandise.

I do think there’s a decent game hidden in Roll and Reanimate. However, I have a big backlog of games that I haven’t tried yet and a bunch of games I enjoy and want to replay. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Roll and Reanimate.