Gaming with scrap paper

Recently, when I didn’t have access to my phone but was bored, I sketched out a five by five grid on the scrap paper and used my watch’s die roller to play Knizia’s Criss Cross using numbers as the six symbols. Board games are the best fidget toys.

But it made me think about what kind of games you could improvise like that.

Specifically solitaire games. Two player pencil-and-paper games are a time honored genre. Tic Tac Toe, Dots and Squares and whole books of them.

First of all, any game you can scribble down from memory has to be fairly simple. Maybe you can draw the tables from 30Rails from memory but I can’t. Second of all, while I think it’s kind of necessary to use dice, it becomes awkward to use too many.

Actually, more than Criss Cross, Wurfel Bingo and its sequel Knaster are really obvious choices.  They also only require a 5 x 5 grid and a couple of dice. And have rules you can easily carry around in your head. Criss Cross just happens to my go to in general for a super quick roll and write.

If you had more dice, you can go with something like Can’t Stop Express. Back in the olden days, scrap paper was pretty much how I normally played it. There’s also Yahtzee but I’d rather play Can’t Stop Express. Mind you, if we’re to the point where we’re talking about five or more dice, are we still in the world of scrap paper, pick up improv gaming?

While it can’t be played solitaire, I think the ultimate pick up with random stuff game is Zendo. Yes, it’s traditional to play it with plastic pyramids and other shapes, you can make koens with anything at hand.

At the end of the day, this isn’t something I’m going to get into the habit of. And I’ll probably just fall back in Criss Cross. But I still think it’s interesting to think about.