Weeds is kind of, sort of good

 Weeds by TravelSoft (as opposed to other games named Weed or Weeds) is a (currently) free PnP Solitaire Tile-Laying game.

The game consists of twenty-seven cards. Eighteen of them are weed cards, which show a two-by-three grid of six weeds, ranging in size from one to three. The other nine cards are weed killers, which just show a spray bottle. The weeds are color-coded but the fact that they are clearly numbered and slightly size-differenced makes the game gray-scale friendly. In fact, I am colorblind enough that printing the cards in color wouldn't have helped me. 

The idea behind the game is that you are trying cover up all the weeds. Draw a card, place a card on your tableau. Cards can overlap (or else there wouldn't be a game) but weeds can only cover weeds of the same size. After you place all the cards, you take the weed killer cards and try to cover up all the weeds or at least as many as you can. That's the basic idea of the game. There are a couple other elements that I'll get to.

Okay, Weeds is pretty clearly a simplified version of Orchard: The Nine Card Solitaire Game. For me, Orchard was a game changer, completely changing my thoughts on how small a tile laying game could be. More than that, Orchard and its sequels, Grove and Forage, are truly solid games. One of the big questions that Weeds has to ask is "Is there a reason why I would play this over Orchard or Grove or Forage?" It also reminds me of a game from a Nine-Card Design Contest, Condense the Code, which also focused on laying cards to take up the smallest area possible.

First of all, I am just going to say that Weeds is not as good as the Orchard family. I do like it more than Condense the Code, whose noteworthy element was legacy play that felt very gimmicky. However, Weeds does bring one thing to the table that I think adds value: variations.

The base game has you use all eighteen weed cards and only six of the weed killer cards. However, the rules include variants for using fewer weed cards (and even identifies the two hardest-to-cover cards) and tweaking the number of weed killer cards, up to the complete nine. Shuffling all twenty-seven cards together and play the weed killer cards as they come out. And encouragement to make up your own variations.

I will also note that Weeds doesn't actually have a formal losing condition. Obviously, if you cover all the weeds, you win. However, there isn't a scale for officially judging how badly you've done. However, with the different variants requiring their own scale, I guess I can forgive that absence.

Weeds has one major issue, which I’ve already gone over. There are better alternatives to it. I've already mentioned the Orchard family, which share a core mechanic but add resource management (you only have so many dice for scoring), scoring, goals and ways to nudge the placement rules. Even if I am looking for a quick tile-laying game where I don't have to worry about dice and tokens, I would reach for Ukiyo or Confusing Lands or part of the Sprawlopolis family first.

With that said, Weeds should still get some play. There are too many times when I am too brain foggy to really do an Orchard or Spawlopolis game justice but I could still handle Weeds. The fact that you can easily shrink the game just makes that use even easier.

Weeds isn't a bad game. I don't mind having it around. However, there's a bunch of games I recommend before it.

https://travelsoft.ca/weeds.php

A particularly nice dungeon crawl from Alexander Shen

 Alexander Shen has made a lot of dungeon crawl-themed games and puzzles. Dungeon Run: Pocket is at least the fourth one that I’ve played from Shen that involves drawing on some sort of map or maze.  

Okay, in case this as much of the blog as you read, it’s one of the better dungeon crawls I’ve tried  from Shen.

I have the PnP version. It consists of a deck of ten monster cards and a deck of twenty-six treasure cards. Oh and a book of 197 maps, which consist of a starting staircase, monster encounters (designated with numbers for monster level), treasure chests, walls and open spaces.

After you pick out a dungeon, you shuffle the treasure deck so it’s ready for the game. Then you shuffle the monster deck and deal out four monsters in a row. They’re going to be your denizens for this dungeon. And the order you draw them in is their level. So you can have a first level dragon and a fourth level chicken. All ones are the same monster and all twos and so on. And virtually all of the monsters have some sort of special effect.

You start at the stairs and move one space at a time. I couldn’t find anything in the rules about backtracking so I just used a pawn, but you could also draw a line for your path as well. When you move onto a treasure trust, you cross it off and draw a treasure card, which can have a good or bad instant effect.

When you move onto a monster, you fight it. Nothing happens if you are a higher level than it. If you are the same level, you get a victory point. If it is a higher level, you take the difference in damage, but you get two victory points.

The game ends when either you decide you’ve had enough or you die. If it’s on your own terms, your victory points are your score. If you run out of health, which could happen unexpectedly with a bad treasure chest, you get no points whatsoever.

So, what makes Dungeon Run: Pocket any good? Honestly, more than anything else, it’s the two decks of cards. The random power level of the monsters makes the puzzle aspect a lot more interesting and makes replaying the same dungeon worth doing. And the treasure deck adds a push-your-luck element. Plus Shen’s goofy artwork on the cards adds a lot of flavor.

The large number of maps is a mixed curse. On the one hand, it’s a lot of content. On the other hand, I don’t want to print out what amounts to a book. This isn’t the first time Shen has offered basically a book’s worth of content. (Since some of these games can be published as books, it’s not a big surprise) That said, even printing a handful of maps will give me a lot of play value, particularly with the replay value the decks add.

Alexander Shen specializes in short little brain breaks. And if that doesn’t interest you, Dungeon Run:Pocket isn’t going to change your mind. But it stands out as a particularly good one.

My changing opinion of Handful o Hazards

 Handful o’ Hazards is the first (but not the last!) game I’ve tried from the 2020 PnP Solitaire Contest. It’s a set of tiny little scenarios for a tiny little dice system. Each scenario is on a wallet-sized card and I’m a big fan of games that you can take anywhere.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2481607/wip-handful-hazards-2020-solitaire-pnp-contest-con

Each card is its own little game and scenario with each one is a generic scene from an action movie. An unnamed archeologist with a fedora who clearly not a reference to any Harrison Ford running through a hall of traps. Escaping a biker gang or a giant shark. That sort of thing.

The actual mechanics are roll five dice. Check off two pairs on rows with the fifth die getting checked off on the side. You need to complete all the rows with Ws (for win) before you complete any area that has an L (for lose)

Sooooo... the game lifts Sid Sackson’s Solitaire Dice/Can’t Stop Express/a-bunch-of-other-names entirely and adds a tiny veneer of theme and some restrictions. The end result is very playable but doesn’t have the more flexible open structure of Sid Sackson’s game.

While I realize that the is supposed to be a handful of tiny stand-alone games so you can pull a card out anywhere and have a quick game, I think it would be stronger if it was more of a campaign. That could be just having the scenarios form one story or completing a scenario giving you a tiny bonus  (like a one time +/- to a die) That would make the game stand out more from Sackson’s game.

BIG EDIT: aaand I found out that there is already an expansion set of five scenarios that did exactly what I wanted from Handful O Hazards. Handful of Hoodoo lets you play a campaign of three scenarios. You choose from two level one and two level two scenarios with the final level being the same. And you will get bonuses and penalties depending on if you win or lose scenario.

I actually quite like how the bonuses and penalties are handled. Depending on what you get, you modify the rows as opposed to dice manipulation. Seeing as how I’ll probably be playing the game while waiting in the car with a dice app, this is elegant and functional design choice.

And there’s at least one more expansion on the way.

I have to admit that Handful of Hoodoo completely flipped my opinion of Handful o Hazards. It went from a hack of a game I like that hasn’t had anything interesting done to it to ‘oh, now this is interesting.’ I’ll actually recommend it to folks I know who like the Sackson game.

I look for either two things from a PnP solitaire game, apart from being any good. Either I want to easily be able to get a quick game in or I want a meaty game. Handful o Hazards does a nifty job of the former.

Some introductory thoughts on Print and Play

One of the many areas of gaming, dare I even say fringe groups, that interest me is print and play.

Print and Play is when you make your own copy of the game. Now, I don't mean you designed the game yourself. I mean that you simply craft your own copy of the game that somebody else designed.

And nor do I mean that you pirate a copy of a game in order to avoid making sure that people don't get royalties. Many games exist only in print and play form and many companies will cheerfully sell you PDFs so that you can make your own copy. On top of that, there are hobby designers who will happily post files of their games so that people can make them.

There are literally hundreds of games out there that are free for you to make.

Of course, when I say free, I mean you don't have to pay the designer or the publisher anything. You still have to go through the time and the effort and material costs of making the game. And, while there are some PnP that are well worth all that, there are also some that are just junk.

(To be fair, you can also spend good money on games that are junk)

Despite that, it's something that I have been interested in for a good many years. And, since I have been working on breaking my bad habit of binge buying games, it's become more of a focus for the collector side of my hobby.

Mind you, I don't make a lot of the games that I look into. Although, if I actually bought the game, then I'm a whole lot more likely to actually make it. Kind of amusing, when you consider one of the initial draws PnP was that it was technically free. Still, there is the desire to get value out of something that you have actually paid for and there's a stronger likelihood that the game has been more heavily play tested.

Still, having electronic folders of print and play designs definitely has helped keep me from finding a bunch of new games. It satisfies my collecting itch.

While it is still a niche part of the gaming hobby, I suspect that print and play is becoming more and more common. The reason for that is simple. Technology.

With a black-and-white laser jet printer, a laminator from Amazon basics, and a paper cutter, it is fairly easy for me to make cards and boards and tokens and tiles. In other words, with some not unreasonable tools that we bought for non-game related purposes, I can make things fairly easily.

(And, yes, when we got them, we knew that I would be using them to make games. But we did get them for other reasons as well)

And PnP is an easy hobby to dabble in. There are some decent games, like Knizia's Decathlon or Pair of Dice's Pagoda, that just require you to print a page and add dice. If you don't mind using a pair of scissors, there are a lot of games that are just a few pages of cards or tiles.

Print and play is a subject I know I'll come back to a lot. It is a quirky world of gaming just off the main road.