Some mini reviews about some free R&W games

A week or so ago, I posted a blog about some free Roll and Write games you can print out yourself. Some of them I’ve written about and some of them I’m planning on writing about but I thought it would be fun to do a quick paragraph or two about each one.

While most of these games can be played solitaire, I did want to pick games that could be played multi-player. If we switched to solitaire, you got a lot more choices of free R&W. However, playing with other folks is a big part of gaming.

Reiner Knizia’s Decathlon - Being from 2003, this is the oldest game out of the ones I picked basically out of the back of my mind. Okay, it’s a collection of ten mini dice games. That’s the game in a set sentence. Honestly, it’s a fascinating deconstruction and exploration of Yahtzee. Its biggest flaw for me is it can run a little long but it’s still fun with plenty of choices and people are still playing it after all these years for a reason.

Okay, I feel like I should also mention Knizia’s other free dice game, Katego. Yeah, it’s not nearly as good. 

30 Rails - This is the lovechild of Take It Easy and Metro. (I’m going to steal that line from myself when I finally get around to giving it a proper review) You’re filling in a grid with tracks. One die tells you which piece of track you’re drawing in and the other tells you the column or row. Full of tough decisions that will make you throw the pencil across the room. Minimal art and components with very simple rules but it comes together so well.

Bento Blocks - The only game on the list you can’t play solitaire (but the designer used the same ideas for the really fun solitaire Ada Lovelace: Consulting Mathematician) In the game, you use dice drafting to pick out Tetris shapes to fill in a grid that’s a cross between a bento box and a sudoku puzzle. It’s an idea that I believe will at some point get published and then get a lot of love.

Recycling Route - Using path drawing, set collection and I-Cut-You-Pick dice drafting, you drive through the city and pick up recyclables and garbage. There’s a lot going on in Recycling Route, including the ability to upgrade your truck. It feels like 3/4 of a pick-up-and-deliver game. I wish it had the last quarter but it still an amazing piece of work for one piece of paper. As time has gone on, I’ve come to like it more and more.

Welcome to DinoWorld - Welcome To DinoWorld won last year’s GenCan’t game design contest and I can see why. You are not only creating a map, you are creating an infrastructure of dinosaurs and special buildings. As the game progresses, you assign die numbers to different types of buildings so there’s a lot of variety and replay value. It has the meat of a much bigger game on a one-page, three dice R&W.

I also have learned Welcome To DinoWorld is going to get Kickstarted. My response is what took so long? I don’t know if the free version is going to continue to be available but it sounds like they are doing a lot of upgrades and changes so it might. Regardless, I am backing it.

I freely admit that price can make a big difference in my opinion of a game. The fact that you just need access to a printer, a pencil and some dice to play all five of these games definitely adds some shine to them in my eyes. But all five of them go well beyond ‘eh, it’s free, print it’ They are fun stuff.

 

Do I buy R&W or just make them myself?

I recently heard 2018 referred to as the Year of the Roll and Write. (It was on Shut Up and Sit Down, which a friend recommended I try, and during a preview of Welcome To, which sounds like a really fun game) I’m sure someone will actually do some kind of meta exploration of the recent escalation and evolution of designer R&W games but I feel like it’s been going strong for more than just this year.

(From what I can tell, Qwixx is what really got the ball rolling but games like Roll Through the Ages and the Catan Dice Game and Zooloretto the Dice Game proved the market was out there many years earlier. I will also admit that games like SteamRollers are showing how R&W can be have serious depth and meat)

Honestly, I like R&W a lot. Heck, I even enjoy the odd game of Yahtzee now and then. However, I have this problem going out and buying R&W games: There are enough good free ones I can make myself that I almost never feel like buying one. Shucks, add some sort of plastic protector and some dry erase markers and you have a copy that you can use indefinitely.

Off hand and focusing on games that are free, legal, fun and suitable for multiple players, I would recommend Knizia’s Decathlon, Bento Blocks, Welcome to DinoWorld, Recycling Route and 30 Rails to anyone who is interested in Roll and Write. If I were to open it up to games that are exclusively solitaire, the list would explode. And that’s without trying hard.

I am a lazy PnP guy, with a big focus on micro card games that don’t require a lot of work. But R&W Games are the ultimate lazy PnP. You just need a printer, some dice and some pencils. And some of them really are very good.

Let’s face it. Nobody can play every game that’s out there. What we end up playing has to be part of a balance of time and money and personal tastes (both your own and those of the folks you are playing with) For me at least, PnP games balance those elements very well and the ones I’ve mentioned strike me as ones that will do the same for other folks.

At the same time, I have to be fair. It seems like published R&W games are becoming not just more and more polished but also more and more complex. In the case of games like Welcome To, going beyond the PnP may prove very much worth it.

(Also, to be fair, I will and have bought PnP files for R&W games. I like making PnP games)

Recycling Route - dice drafting and picking up recyclables

GenCan't Roll and Write Library - Recycling Route

In Recycling Route, you're driving your recycling truck around the city, picking up different kinds of reusable garbage and effectively trying to corner the market on some of them. Along the way, you're going to get stuck with some legit garbage that has to go to the landfill and you might even get to upgrade your truck. Because there's nothing more exciting than a speeding garbage truck :D

The centerpiece of the mechanics is a fairly nifty dice drafting mechanic, where you choose either three dice you can see or three you can't. Seriously, it's a cool take on dice drafting and definitely really pretty pushes the game to the next level or maybe the level above that. You also have set collecting and route building.

Recycling Route is one of the finalists from GenCan't Roll and Write Contest. Which means it's a free print and play and, like most of the entries, you just have to print out player sheets and add dice and pencils. Man, I've been writing that a lot but I kind of have to.

In Recycling Route, the player sheet consists of a map of the city, which is a square grid with some squares already filled in with gray, and a checklist of different types of recyclables as well as truck upgrades and the infamous landfill. You get two player sheets per page because you'll need two for the solitaire rules.

Okay, here's the cool bit. On your turn, you secretly roll six dice and divide them into two groups of three. You reveal one set and the next player chooses either the set they can see or the unknown one. And you get the other. You each write down the numbers on open spaces on your map and then you, the active player, extend your route/drive your truck through the city.

Okay, what you really do is draw a line and extend it each turn. You start on the highest left box and will eventually end on the lowest rate box. At the start of the game, you can drive through three boxes at a time.

When you pass through a number, you check it off on your checklist. In game terms, that means you picked up that particular type of recyclable. Each number is broken down into sets of boxes, and you get a bonus if you complete a set first.

Ones and sixes are special. Ones can either be used to upgrade your truck so it moves faster or is wilds with another number you pick up the turn. Sixes are legit garbage that you have to dump into the landfill. That starts off being negative but ends up being positive points, to keep you from trying to dump sixes on someone. And you reroll sixes after you check them off.

The game ends when all but one player has driven off the map. In the solitary game, the robot opponent uses drones to grab numbers off your map. Either way, most points wins.

Out of the four finalists in the contest (Washington D6, Ada Lovelace and Jurassicco being the other three), Recycling Route just barely edges into fourth place for me. Which _isn't_ to say I dislike it or think it's a bad game. I don't. The dice drafting is great and Recycling Route not only is the only game with multi-player rules, it's probably stronger in that format.

However, it feels the most unfinished and least polished out of the four games. I can honestly picture the other three games having a shot at getting it published. Recycling Route feels like it needs some more refinement.

Between being able to upgrade your truck and picking up different kinds of trash and recyclables, I feel like the game is 3/4 of the way to being a full pick-up-and-deliver game. I don't know exactly how you would add a deliver function and still keep it down to one page of easy bookkeeping but if that was part of the game, I think it would be a big boost.

As it stands, I still think Recycling Route is a good game, made better by being free and easy to make. It is staying in my solitaire binder and will continue to see play. And if I get more multi-player games in, my opinion might get better.

 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232920/recycling-route