Creative Kids R&Ws part three

 Yup. Still working my way through these. Looking at them as a gamer and as a substitute teacher.

Block Craft

Despite the obvious reference to Minecraft, this is another game about drawing shapes on grids. Which is a great genre so that’s not a knock.

You have six numbered 4x4 grids that have gems and holes scattered on them. You have six numbered shapes.

Block Craft lasts eight turns. Each turn, you roll one die. You can either chose a grid that matches that number and draw any two of the  shapes on it OR you can pick a shape that matches the number and draw it on two different grids.

You get points for covering up gems, ‘mining’ then. You get bonus points for collecting every gem of a type across the six grids and for collecting every gem on a grid. There’s also a bonus for not covering any holes.

But it f you cover three or more holes in a grid, you’ve destabilized it, collapsing it. You can’t draw on it and you lose any points you’d have gotten from it.

I have to admit that I like Block Craft. The decision space is wide open. You have a lot of options and it is fun.

That said, I can see students being confused by having that many choices. I also wonder if the broad decision tree makes it too easy to do well :D

Words

Seriously, there couldn’t have been a better name than Words?

Words is an acrostic word game. That’s where you have words interconnected like in a crossword puzzle or Scrabble. 

The player sheet is a grid with some letters already filled in and some filled in spaces. You have six categories: names, animals, food, items, colors and wild. Roll the die to get the category and write in a word.

You don’t have to make it an acrostic but you get extra points if you do. You lose three points if you can’t write in a word but it honestly takes some bad play to do that. Ten turns and you’re done.

It’s an okay word game. If you like word games, it’s a good little filler. But, as long as I’m working with kids who can spell, Words is really promising.  It’s clearly educational and acrostics are a concept that should be familiar and easy to pick up.

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One thing that I really like about both Block Craft and Words is that they have broad decision trees. I play them with a room full of people, kids or otherwise, every sheet is going to look different.

Pointree: a game about a tree with a decision tree

 Pointree was a game I was looking forward to trying after I read about it since, hey, it’s about helping a tree get healthy. (Well, what else does making life energy flow through a tree mean?)

It’s a Roll and Write game that belongs to the Take It Easy school of design. Which means that everyone uses the same rolls so there’s no technical limit to the number of folks who can play and it works just as well as a solitaire game.

The sheet has the outline of a tree with a network of connected boxes inside it. The boxes come in three different colors and are either blank or already have a number. Pointree lasts six rounds and each round you roll six dice and then do something with them.

The core mechanic of the game is dirt simple. You can fill in a blank box with the number from a single die. You can mark of pre-numbered boxes with one or more dice that add up to that number or more. You start at the roots and all the boxes you fill in have to be connected. 

There are six different ways to score points and you have to pick one of them at the end of each round. And, no, you don’t get to pick any of them twice. And there are a variety of ways to get bonus points, including checking off sets of ones and twos. (Which is a nice touch since high rolls are intrinsically better)

I quite like Pointree and one reason why is that I keep doing badly at it.  Despite being mechanically simple, Pointree is not readily solvable. And, while it would help, I don’t think rolling all sixes is the solution. Pointree has an actual decision tree. 

Pointree is a Roll and Write that feels like it started out life as a board game. In some Roll and Writes, the sheet is just a place to write down the die rolls. In Pointree, how you develop your paths and connections is the meat of the game, not to mention how you cope with bad rolls.

Pointree is my game of choice if I wanted to get people to try out Ignatov’s designs.

Mixture is a mixture of too much luck and too many interesting ideas

Mixture is an odd ride.

Of the four Roll and Write games that Radoslaw Ignatov released early from his Kickstarter (we have them all now, thanks!), I feel like it is both the weakest and most interesting.

On the one hand, I think it is the most luck-based and feels like it has the most restrained choices. On the other hand, the structure of the game feels the most unique to me. 

In Mixture, you are an alchemist working on their final exam by mixing up different concoctions. Each turn, you get three different ingredients that you have to add to a lattice that represents either an alchemy recipe book or a laboratory.

And here’s what I find different and interesting. It’s really a sliding puzzle game. You’re sliding ingredients into a grid that looks a crossword puzzle. You can’t jump over already placed ingredients or contaminated spaces so you have to do your best to plan ahead. (And, no, you’re not actually sliding anything. You’re rolling up symbols and crossing them off on the board) Your goal is to complete lines of symbols.

But... each turn you just roll one die. As a general rule of thumb, a Roll and Write built around single, unmodified die roll raises questions for me. It creates an environment that is very swingy. Of course, anytime you are rolling dice, luck is going to play a part. But with only one die, lick it gets a lot more control. Even two dice is a significant improvement. (That’s why Can’t Stop works) The only one die R&W that I really recommend is 13 Sheep and that works because the game is so slight.

Now, that die in Mixture gives you a choice of two different sets of three symbols and if you roll the same number three times, you can add one to get two different sets to work with. And there are a couple special actions and bonus symbols. So, you have options. There are definitely choices. But, compared to any other game I’ve looked at by Ignatov, Mixture feels the most constrained. Alpakaland, in comparison, feels like a sandbox R&W.

Still, I haven’t seen a Roll and Write like Mixture. (If you have, I’d love to heard about it) It’s an interesting system. And there is a version that involves direct conflict. I’m really curious to see that because I think that could really elevate Mixture.

Even if it is the weakest game I end up playing from Ignatov, Mixture has been worth trying out.

Some Kind of Genius started my Ignatov journey

 Some Kind of Genius is the first of Radow Ignatov’s designs that I’ve tried (and that was because he released early as a bonus to his Kickstarter backers) Compared to the other designs he’s released since then, it is the most ‘boring’ design of his that I’ve seen. 

Of course, boring in this case means using a mechanic I’ve seen before. At its heart, Some Kind of Genius is a game where you roll some dice and check off boxes. But that’s how you could describe Qwixx or That’s Pretty Clever or Roll Through the Ages so it’s in the company of games that I play over and over again.

In theory, Some Kind of Genius is themed around exercising your brain (which I guess you do do) In practice, it’s a bunch of sets of boxes printed over a picture of a brain. Each set represents a brain cell and each hemisphere is a network of neurons connecting the cells.

There are three colors of cells (which come in color-blind friendly shapes, by the way) and they come in three different flavors. They are: cross off specific numbers; have the dice add up to a specific number; and complete a very simple mathematical equation. Trust me, it all makes a lot of sense as soon as you look at it.

You roll six dice and then use those rolls to fill in boxes. That’s going to happen seven times and that’s game. On top of filling in the cells, you can use dice to fill in straights for bonus points in specific colors. And you can spend dice to duplicate die rolls via neurons.

After the seven rounds, you figure out your points. There’s bonus points for earning very specific numbers of colors of cells. And if you go over, you don’t get those points. Whoever gets the most points, wins. Unless you’re playing solitaire, of course. Then you are the winner.

What is hilarious is that the easiest way to explain Some Kind of Genius is to just show someone the player sheet. It’s very intuitive.

What Some Kind of Genius has is a lot of choices, particularly for a game that takes up so little time and space. By the end of the game, you won’t even have filled in half the board. So you have to priotize and the decisions you make will impact your final score.

Basically what I’m saying is that Some Kind of Genius doesn’t reinvent the wheel or come up with a new wheel, it is a very solid wheel. I have had fun playing Some Kind of Genous and will play it some more.

I currently think that completing a straight for bonus points in a color is the strongest play. However, that does mean dedicating six dice to that and without having the neurons to help you manipulate those rolls. And if you don’t complete the straight, those rolls are worth nothing.

Some Kind of Genius is a good casual Roll and Write and makes me look forward to the rest of Ignatov’s designs.