Thank you, Jeugo Roll & Write

 I finished doing an archive binge of Juegos Roll & Write (https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/9402 ), specifically looking for Print and Play games that I hadn’t heard of yet. And, yes, a hefty chunk of what I found were ones I had already looked into but it was still a good experience.

It’s one of the blogs I regularly look at, both for PnP information and just out of curiosity. And I think that Roll and Write games are more valuable than ever in quarantine times. They are the easiest form of PnP to make and a huge chunk of them have solitaire options or are just plain solitaires. When your options for gaming or game partners are limited and restricted, that is awesome.

Jueglos Roll & Write actually has had several entries specifically addressing that, featuring collections that are particularly quarantine friendly.

Over the last few years, my opinion of Roll and Writes has changed and, frankly, gotten better. First of all, I have been impressed by the depth and variety of what’s out there, even just in the free category. Mind you, I have still had the best experiences with games that I have actually had to actually spend money on :D

Second, while I recommended in the past that if you wanted to get into PnP to go for cards or tiles games since actually having to craft components meant you had some skin in the game, I now think an only-R&W-PnP experience is viable. Part of that comes from the variety that is out there (and there are plenty that actually require you make cards or such :D) 

However, it also comes back to the quarantine conditions. You may not be able to get the materials to make cards or dice or such. But you are more likely to be able to print off a R&W sheet or hand copy one. It may be what is possible. And gaming is great way of dealing with stress.

And if that is what you need, Jueglos Roll & Write is really nifty.

PS I was really happy when I learned through the blog that someone has made a nice PnP version of Sid Sackson’s solitaire pinball game. Woo-hoo!

Discovering a new blog and reading about an RPG contest

I recently stumbled across www.thefreerpgblog.com. Honestly, being someone who is interested in quirky RPGs, it's amazing it took me this long. And the first post I really poured over were the entries for the 2013 Harder Than Granite 24-Hour RPG competition.

Rob Lang, who writes the blog, set some pretty tough additional requirements. The games had to not include numbers and they had to fit in pocketmods. For them that don't know, a pocketmod is folding and cutting a regular sheet of paper into a little eight-page pamphlet.

No numbers was an interesting idea, since that meant so many basic RPG concepts get ruled out. Pocketmod seemed a bit more odd to me, since PDFs and ebooks and mobile devices have made me stop caring about the size of rule books :P

Oh, and he also wanted designers to include an NPC named after the guy who runs one thousand monkeys one thousand typewriters since 1KM1KT is the biggest online collection of free RPGs.

The contest gave me nineteen tiny, odd little RPGs to read through and I did that in over the course of twenty-four hours. Not that impressive when you remember that that was just reading nineteen single-sided sheets of paper.

I found that some of them were really just conflict resolution systems, which honestly didn't interest me that much. Some of those were really interesting ideas for mechanics but they didn't give me a game I wanted to play.

But others had much tighter focuses. They gave me settings and told me what kind of story I was going to get out of the game. They had serious structures. Which is actually really impressive for such a small space. They also usually had actually simpler rule sets but I'm cool with that.

You see, if I'm going to carry around a RPG in my pocket, I want to be able to play it at the drop of my hat with five minutes or less of teaching. Simplicity married to a structure/story is what I want.

Truth to tell, I came away with five or so games I think would be fun to play, a couple more than I want revisit and examine and one that is the product of an insane mind that I had to share with a bunch of friends. (The core rules of A Flask Full of Gasoline will put you in the emergency room.)

I am really happy that I found the Free RPG Blog and the 2013 contest was such a fun introduction.

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com

Back in 2011, I started keeping a blog on Boardgame Geek, writing about gaming and games with occasional ramblings about books or movies or life in general.

However, I've decided that I need to try blogging out in the bigger world. BGG has been a great place to blog and I love the community there. It's been a very safe and comfortable to blog. But if I want to grow as a blogger, it's time to step out a bit.

I have tried writing very focused blogs in the past but it didn't give me the freedom to ramble about whatever I felt like writing about. So this is going to be about whatever I feel like writing about.

A lot of the time, it will be about gaming because that's something I love to ramble and ponder about. But I'm sure I'll spend time on books and movies and cats and life in general.

Okay, that's my intro. I've just gotten started.