You too can build DinoWorld!

I’ve been meaning to write about Welcome To DinoWorld for about a year now. Since the game is going to be kickstarted soon, it’s really time for me to finally do it.

Welcome to DinoWorld, at least in its current incarnation, is a free Roll & Write game where each player is designing their own theme park that has real dinosaurs. Why yes, there are rules for dinosaur breakouts and ensuing devastation. Why do you ask?

Everyone starts off with an almost blank grid to draw their park in. There are three stages to every turn: Acquisition (drawing in buildings), Path (drawing in paths) and  Security (how close are those dinosaurs to breaking out?) And all three stages revolve around rolling one to three dice at the start of the turn.

The acquisition phase is what I think really makes the game shine. The first time a number is rolled, you assign that number to a building or attraction and draw it in. Every time after that the number is rolled, you have to add that building or attraction to the board. As the game goes on, more dice get rolled, adding to the decisions.

I also have to note that some of the buildings or services aren’t just for points but add special abilities. You are developing an infrastructure, not just drawing a map.

Paths is, well, drawing in paths with pieces determined by the dice. After all, guests need to be able to get to the dinosaurs and other attractions.

And security determines how close particular dinosaurs are to breaking out and causing property damage. And remember, that’s your property!

The game ends when either someone runs out of space or has too many dinosaurs on the loose. And, not surprisingly, most points wins.

Taken in complete isolation, Welcome To DinoWorld is a good game, fun with an amusing theme and plenty of choices. But when you add in that it’s a free to download and doesn’t require any more construction then printing, that adds a lot of value to the game. Plus, there’s a lot of game crammed onto one page.

Last year’s Roll and Write contest at GenCan’t really made me reassess how much you can do with the R&W format and Welcome To DinoWorld, the winner, really impressed me. My reaction to playing it was ‘Why is this not on Kickstarter?’

And now I’ve learned it will be on Kickstarter for a couple months. And apparently they’ve been working on making a lot of changes on the game. I’m quite curious to see what it ends up being like and I am planning on backing it.

For now, at least, the original version is free and out there and well worth checking out.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232524/welcome-dinoworld

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)