Pick Up and Deliver on one piece of paper

Having finally gotten around to playing all twelve of the Legends of Dsyx games, I then went back to the very first one I tried: Gryphon Delivery Service.

Almost all the games involve mucking about with a grid of some sort or another. GDS is one of the exceptions to that rule. It is a solitaire Roll-and-Move Roll-and-Write Print-and-Play Pick-Up-and-Deliver game.

It’s when I write sentence like that that I remember what one of my gaming gurus told me: ‘Jargon interferes with communication’ Of course, he was talking about corporate life but the rule still applies to gaming.

Okay, the board is a track marked with spaces that let you pick up goods, sell goods or have random events go off. You effectively have three pawns, the gryphons who are delivering stuff. Roll four dice and assign three of them. You write the letter of the gryphon in the space you move it to and no other gryphon can land there. Game ends when one gryphon completes the track.

And there are other little touches. You can choose to not deliver an item but instead increase the price of the item. Raising the demand, I assume. Each product has a special ability that you can use instead of selling it. Each gryphon also has some special abilities, the most annoying being a speed bonus since there are times when you want to mosey up the track.

My opinion of Gryphon has actually improved since my earlier plays. One of my problems with it was how short the game is. You burn through that track pretty quickly and doing your best to pump the brakes is pretty key.

Revisiting it, it think the short track actually forces the game to be tight. Every decision makes a major difference and forces you to make the most of every special ability. Gryphon isn’t Steam on one piece of paper but it is a decent puzzler of a game. Between the number of options and the randomness of the dice, I think there’s a lot of replay value.

(That said, I would like to see the core mechanics expanded to a bigger PnP Pick Up and Deliver game)

Gryphon Delivery Service was my entry point to the Legends of Dsyx. I have described the series as trying to fit a boxed game into a sheet of paper. Gryphon does that better than any other game in the series.

(And I just picked up Postmark Games’ Voyages so I guess I’ll be looking at another PnP R&W Pick Up and Deliver game soon)

Titans wraps up Dsyx for me

With Titans of Dsyx, I have now played every game in the Legends of Dsyx series.  And, while I didn’t save the best for last, it was a pretty good one.

(Hall of the Dwarven King is still tops)

In Titans, you are filling in one of those grids that are marked out like a brick wall so it’s really a hex grid, even though the sections are squares. There’s also a table of map features. You start by rolling a die and drawing that map feature anywhere on the grid.

Here’s the deal: each turn, you roll three dice. One die will be the direction you move from the last thing you drew. Another die will be how many spaces you move. That other die, using the table, that will be what you draw. Twenty turns and you’re done.

So what’s the clever bit, you ask. Glad you asked.  That would be terraforming. Almost every map feature gets upgraded when drawn next to another map feature, usually itself. If you’d draw a tree next to a tree, you draw a forest instead. Grassland by a lake, that becomes a town. And there’s a third tier of map features, like castles and volcanos that are worth the real points.

And there’s a couple event tables. After you build a town or an arch, you roll for an event that will add or remove map features.

If your turn is impossible to complete, you cross out a map feature  and redraw it anywhere that’s blank.

After you are done, figure out how many points your completed map is worth. Since this is beat your best score’, you are really playing for the experience of making a nifty map. Fortunately, that’s a good experience.

I quite enjoyed Titans of Dsyx. Yeah, the random number generator goes can completely destroy your plans and sometimes having to erase and redraw is a mixed blessing in disguise. However, the goal of trying to build bigger and better things is clear and easy to understand. And making a portal or a world tree is very satisfying.

A couple years after he made Titans of Dsyx, Robin Gibson made a couple of similar games, Wheat & Ale and Timber & Fur. While not Dsyx games, they are filling in a hex grid with  symbols. They are simpler and a lot less random. And, frankly, I like Titans better. It is bigger and crazier, even if it harder to make a plan come together. It’s just a wilder, deeper ride.

When I first started looking at the Legends of Dsyx four years ago (Cthulhu on a moped, was it really that long ago!?),  I felt like Robin Gibson was trying to cram entire box-sized game on one side of a piece  of paper, rules and all. Designers keep on pushing the boundaries of what you can do with Roll and Write medium. (We have come a long way from Kismet being cool for adding color to Yahtzee) but the Legends of Dsyx are still some interesting experiments.

Now that I’ve learned them all… time to go back and revisit the ones I haven’t played in a while.

Making dirigibles out of dice rolls

 It’s been over a year since I last looked at the Legends of Dsyx series. Which actually surprises me a bit, since I think it’s an interesting exploration of both Print and Play and Roll and Write. 

The Legends of Dsyx is a series of twelve games that are simultaneously one page, rules and all, while really pushing the envelope about what you can do with Roll and Write. Seriously, I get the sense that Robin Jarvis was trying to create ‘big’ games in a very small design space. 

And when I first ran across them, I was fascinated. It was relatively early in my exploration of Roll and Writes and the Legends of Dsyx were part of my realization that Roll and Writes could go well beyond just writing down numbers. 

Those ideas now seem old hat but they were pretty wild to me at the time.

All that said, the Legends of Dsyx are a mixed bag. Some are very solid. Hall of the Dwarven King is a hidden gem of a game. But some of them feel half-finished. I think some of them genuinely suffer from the one-page format.

So, I tried out Derelict Dirigible. How did it measure up?

Dsyx is a kitchen-sink fantasy universe that is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Derelict Dirigible is about gnomes building airships out of salvaged junk. Clearly, Dragonlance casts a long shadow.

Derelict Dirigible last fifteen turns and each turn has three parts. Salvage, where you roll dice to get materials. Building, wheee you spend materials to add parts to your airship. You actually draw the part on a blueprint grid, creating an increasingly complex dirigible as the game goes on. Adventure. There’s a list of adventures with lift and speed requirements. Meet the requirements and you check it off for points and improvements to your scavenging.

Derelict Dirigible feels like it is 75% there. The designing and building of your airship, which is where most of the actual gameplay is, is good. It requires some real planning and decision making. Every part has trade offs. Boilers, for instance, are necessary for powering props but weigh your airship down and require coal.

Adventures, on the other hand, feel like a missed opportunity. Adventures are just a checklist. You build an airship and then you just see if it’s up to spec. And this is where the one page restriction really shows. Having additional pages devoted to adventures, giving them narrative weight and gameplay would add a lot and make sense with the idea of the game.

Honestly, I enjoyed Derelict Dirigible on the strength of the airship building alone. I do want to return to it and work on making better dirigibles. But I also think it could have been a lot more.

The fluff and flaws of Goblins Guns and Grog

It’s been a while since I have learned a Legends of Dsyx title but I felt like it was time to revisit the series.  I’d been planning on trying Goblins, Guns and Grog for a while so that’s what got picked.

In Goblins, Guns and Grog, you control the destiny of five stranded goblin pirates as they try to float on a raft home, trying not to die and trying to loot as many ships as possible.

The game really revolves around two things:

Making sure you have enough fish to not starve and building up the raft so you have cannons to attack ships and chests to store loot from defeated ships.

I’m of two minds about G to the third power.

On the one hand, I feel comfortable saying that it’s the mechanically weakest of the Legends of Dsyx games I’ve tried (which is ten of the twelve  at this point) The dice control enough that you sometimes have very little decisions. In my first game, my goblins starved to death on the fourth turn. 

If you can build up a big enough raft and outfit it, you do get more options. However it takes some luck to get to that point.

With a little bit of luck, your goblin pirates will survive their sea voyage. With a lot of luck, they will be able to bring home loot and score any points.

On the other hand, Goblins et al may have the strongest narrative structure in the entire series. You might not have much control over the story but a story is getting told. It easily has the most fluff of any of the games. Depending on what you want, that can be something.

The weakest element of the game, particularly from a story-telling element, is that the ships you are firing cannons at don’t fight back. Enemy shops are just boxes of hit points.

The Legends of Dsyx series are a bunch of one-page PnP R&Ws. Some of them, like Hall of the Dwarven King, are quite good. Goblins, Guns and Grog, though, feels more like an experiment that doesn’t quite work. It was interesting to try but, out of the series, it is the one I’m least likely to replay.

Such an organized dragon horde!

 Lockpicks was the game that broke my pause on the Legends of Dsyx series. It’s not like I got bored with the series. Theres just so much out in the PnP play world.

Okay, here’s the usual spiel: it’s a PnP, R&W solitaire. You make it yourself. You roll dice and write stuff down. Only one person gets to play at a time.

The game is about picking the locks in the chests in a dragon’s horde. Because this dragon isn’t like Smaug and just leaves stuff lying around. They are apparently type A and hyper organized.

The actual gameplay is quite simple, particular compared to other Legends of Dsyx games. Each chest is a grid with circles in certain spots. There are four tiers of chests and the higher tiers are more complexity grids.

You have a pool of five dice and each pip type is a different kind of movement. You need to draw a line on the grid with end points in each circle and finally on the lock at the bottom. You then get to roll for a treasure on a table for that particular tier of chest.

One of the most interesting design choices is that all of the dice manipulation comes from the first two tiers of chests. The last two are just points. That gives a mechanical reason to start with the simple chests. Oh and loot is points.

There’s an hour glass track that your check off as you either refresh your dice pool or open chests. But the game doesn’t have to end when you run out of hour glasses. You can keep playing but you automatically lose if you roll a one.

Compared to every other game I’ve played in the series (which is over half of them at this point), Lockpicks feels less intricate than other Legends of Dsyx games. It doesn’t feel as unique. At the same time, I definitely had fun playing it and would cheerfully play it some more. In fact, I might recommend it over other games in the series because it’s particularly easy to explain.

Lockpicks is the least representative of the series in my arrogant opinion. It’s not as thematic as the other games and it’s mechanically simpler. However, it’s mechanically solid. It is fun and accessible.

Roll and Write solitaires are a pretty niche genre. You aren’t going to find your next Agricola there. But Lockpicks was a surprisingly good use of the medium.

Spellcraft Academy: not my cup of tea but still interesting

 I’ve gone back to the Legends of Dsyx, a series of one-page Roll and Writes from Buttonshy. It’s been a while since I played one. Part of the reason I chose to try Spellcraft Academy next is because it only uses one die so it was easy for me to play in a limited space.

In Spellcraft Academy, you are a student trying to create a magic scroll in order to pass your wizardry exams. Stripped of its theme, it is really a word game, the only one in the Legend of Dsyx series. 

The game consists of a letter grid and a blank grid that you write letters in, plus a checklist of Latin words that you are trying to write and a space to track rerolls.

The gameplay is actually pretty simple. You start in the blank center of the letter grid. Roll that one single die and then you count that many spaces in any direction and circle that letter. Write that letter anywhere in your blank scroll grid. Put a slash through that circle, roll the die again and repeat the process from your new location on the letter grid. The game ends when you either decide you’ve done as well as your going to do or you can’t make a legal move. (No going back to a letter you’ve been to)

You are trying to form interlocking words, crossword style. The more words you manage to connect together, the more points that it’s worth. There are three category of words and you get bonus points if you use every word in a category. 

There are two bonus symbols on the letter grid, stars and swirls. Swirls let you add a reroll to your reroll count. You don’t start with any rerolls. You have to earn them. Stars let you write any letter on your scroll grid.

I only have one rules question. I don’t know if you can only make orthogonal moves with your die roll or if diagonal moves are allowed.

I honestly don’t know if I like Spellcraft Academy or not. On the one hand, while I respect word games and I’m willing to play them, they aren’t my favorite genre of game. In short, I’m not the audience for this game. 

Spellcraft Academy also has probably the least theme out of all the games in the series. For me, one of the strong points for the Legend of Dsyx series is how thematic the games are and how much narrative they create. A couple of the games cross the line to being full adventure games. Spellcraft Academy is pretty abstract. I love abstract games but that’s not why I play the Legends of Dsyx games.

On the other hand, the game play seems pretty solid. I’m not sure there’s one optimal strategy. Linking a bunch of short words is one path but trying to get the bonus for using the longer words also seems viable. And it is easily the most complex Roll and Write I’ve seen that just uses one die, even having some manipulation with the stars and swirls.

And honestly, making the letter grid balanced had to be interesting.

In the end, Spellcraft Academy isn’t a game I had a lot of fun with but I found the design interesting. And I am sure I’ll play it some more to explore how balanced the game is.

I find myself liking Robin Gibson's designs

I realized that I've spent a lot of February playing games by Robin Gibson.

That is fundamentally because they have designed a lot of solitaire Roll and Writes that take less than fifteen minutes to play. I’ve been playing a lot of shorter solitaire games over the last few years so that is totally within my wheelhouse. That and the fact that I have spent a lot of time looking at Buttonshy and PnP Arcade.

I’ve already written about Gibson’s Paper Pinball series, which honestly borders on a mindless diversion (although I do like how each pinball table has its own little twist and there is definitely a place for mindless diversions) However, what has really impressed me and made me decide I need to pay attention to Gibson is The Legend of Dsyx series.

Dsyx is apparently a steampunk, fantasy kitchen sink universe. Banks hire dragons to take care of their vaults. Gnomes build dirigibles. Gryphons work as couriers and wear goggles. If you’ve played D&D, there’s a good chance you’ve been to a place like Dsyx.

There are twelve games in the series. I don’t know if there will be more but twelve is still pretty good. Each one tells about a different little chunk of Dsyx and, from what I can tell, vary their mechanics a decent amount.

What I really like about them is they make me feel like I am playing a larger game. Between the theme and the relatively involved mechanics (involved for a single sheet of paper and five, ten minutes), the games in the Legend of Dsyx feel surprisingly meaty.

To be honest, I am pretty sure some of the depth is an illusion. I am sure that each game does have a single optimal strategy that will reliably do better than other choices. A ten-minute Roll and Write can’t complete with a two-hour game that has a lot more moving parts.

However, I am okay with that. The return I get from the minimal investment in time and resources still makes the Legend of Dsyx series a very good return for me. It’s not perfect but it is engaging and interesting.

I’ve only tried three of the games but I am hoping to eventually try them all. I’m in no real hurry since I also don’t want to get burned out on them either.