Shut the Box as a piece of history

I have read that Shut the Box started out as a game that fisherman would play when they were out on the ocean, back in the 1700s. There is even some evidence, if you can believe Wikipedia, that the game has its origins in 12th century northern France.

Beyond any doubt, Shut the Box has spent some centuries being a standard pub game. Still, I really like the image of grizzled fisherman playing it on a swaying boat out on the Atlantic.

While you can easily make the game out of a piece of paper and a pencil, and I have read instructions on how to do just that in books about gaming with children, or using numbered chips, the classic Shut the Box is played with an actual box. Inside the box are wooden flippers marked 1 to 9 or 1 to 12, depending on what version of the game you get. Heck, I'm sure there are other combinations.

Play the game, you grab a couple of regular old dice and roll them. If you are using the box version of the game, use that box is your dice tray. You then flip over some of those numbered flippers. The total of the flippers you flip has to equal the total of the dice you rolled. You keep on going until you can't make a legal rule or you have flipped over all the flippers, in which case you shut the box.

In some versions of the rules, if you're down to only the lower numbered flippers, you can choose to just  roll one die.

There are a lot of different ways to keep track of the score. Sometimes, you add up all the flippers you flipped. Other times, you read them like a number, leading to some pretty crazy scores. In yet other versions of the rules, you win by shutting the box.

It has to be abundantly obvious by now that there are a lot of variations of Shut the Box. But, ultimately, they are all fairly mindless exercises of dice rolling.

Yeah, you do get some decisions in what numbers you flip but you don't get any control, like getting rerolls in Yahtzee. The dice control the game. I can't even really call it a push your luck game since you can't even control when you stop.

Despite that, I do have a certain fondness for the game. I like the history behind it, the idea that it was played in pubs and taverns and fishing ships. There's a sense of romance and past to Shut the Box for me.

I no longer have a copy but I got rid of my old copy knowing it would be an easy game to get again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_the_Box

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9851/shut-box

Yahtzee as a system

Yahtzee is one of those games that is both so easy to scorn and to appreciate. Everyone has heard of it, including folks who have never heard of Catan or Tera Mystica and game designers keep on mining it for inspiration. 

The obvious reason to scorn Yahtzee is because it's a successful mass market game. The gamer subculture can certainly have some elitist tendencies, although I swear that is dwindling as destined games become more mainstream.

However, Yahtzee also is luck-dependent, involves no interaction with the other players and has zero theme. Any one of those things can be a turn-off for some folks and they are all legitimate gripes.

Despite that, I have come to enjoy Yahtzee and have lost any scorn I might have had for it. It's an easy game to cobble together and teach. More than that, it does help teach odds and dice evaluation. It isn't as random as it looks at first.

I even went through a spell of regularly playing Yahtzee online. If I woke up early and wanted to get in a life game without getting out of bed, Yahtzee was a game I knew I could find an opponent and finish a game before I had to get up.

Still, Yahtzee is never going to break into my top 100 games. It's not a game I would actively seek out or suggest to play. Yeah, if someone really wanted to play, I would play Yahtzee and I would have a decent time. However, what I have come to truly love about Yahtzee is how it has been a stepping off point for so many other games.

Simply put, getting two re-rolls and trying for specific combinations of dice faces is a fundamental mechanic for game design. It is one of those bed rock concepts. 

I know that Yahtzee didn't invent those mechanics from scratch. Dice games have been around for thousands of years. But Yahtzee helped codify the formula and helped spread it around, particularly for the non-gambling audience.

There are literally hundreds of games that are built off of the Yahtzee mechanic. I am not even going to pretend to try and list them all. While some are frankly garbage, others are genuinely good. 

And the ones that are fun address the issues that I brought up before. Games like To Court the King add special powers that five players a measure of control. King of Tokyo not only adds interaction by having folks beat each other up, it embraces the rich theme of giant monsters. And that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

Yahtzee has given us a way of understanding and using dice that has created a lot of fun experiences.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahtzee

Outlaw - a super easy game to make yourself

Outlaw is a tiny little dice game that feels like a simplified version of Knizia's Pickomino with a bit of Sackson's Can't Stop and its bell-shaped curve thrown in.

While it is themed around capturing outlaws and bandits in the Wild West, it's really about dice and odds. The board consists of two rows of wanted posters. One is numbered four to nine and the other one is numbered nineteen to twenty-four. Each poster has a reward, ranging from $1000 on the nine and nineteen to $10,000 on the four and twenty-four.

On your turn, you roll four dice with two rerolls. As long as you rolled one of the numbers on a poster, you get to place one of your tokens on that poster. If your opponent had a token on the poster, you replace it. BUT if you already had a token on that poster, you take it back.

When you have three posters claimed, you collect the reward for all three posters and take your tokens back. The first person to get to $50,000 or $40,000 in a three-player game, wins.

I've already compared Outlaw to other games, like Pickomino. And, quite frankly, Outlaw isn't as strong. While there is interaction between the players when you poach claimed posters, it's pretty mild. More importantly, it's too easy to have a turn where nothing happens. 

However, Outlaw does have one very strong thing going for it. It's a free print-and-play that requires virtually no work to make. No cutting and no gluing and no folding. Print out the board and add four dice and three tokens per player. Done and ready to play.

Seriously, for the deep budget gamer, Outlaw is a pretty good deal. It may not be the end all, be all of light dice games but it's still a decent little game. If you are watching your gaming budget, Outlaw is a good choice.

Personally, I am planning on taking the time to mount the board, the rules and the purely optional score board and laminating them as a travel game. Even that will probably cost me less than fifty cents in material costs. I'm also planning on recommending it to family and friends.

Outlaw is a light dice filler. It's not a perfect game. However, for a free, print-and-play game that requires minimal effort to make, Outlaw is well worth the effort.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169309/outlaw

A few simple print and play projects to dabble in

Since I just wrote about Print and Play games, I figured I'd should write about a few very simple projects, ones that don't require more than a printer and a pencil or some dice. Projects with a really low entry point.

First off, lets look at an abstract game that doesn't require anything more than the printed board and a pencil or pen. Hex.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4112/hex

Hex was independently invented by two different mathematicians in the 1940s, Piet Hein and John Nash (yeah, the Beautiful Mind guy) It has one of the simplest rule sets you're ever going to find for boardgame. You play on a hexagonal grid, placing stones or drawing your mark on the individual hexes. Each player is assigned to parallel sides of the board and the goal is to connect your sides.

In other words, take the basic idea of Tic-Tac-Foe and scale it up by a thousand.

A few interesting facts about Hex. One, while 11 x 11 seems to have become the standard board size, there's no restriction on how big or how small the board can be. Two, it has been conclusively proven that it is impossible for there never to be a draw in Hex. Third, Hex popularized the pie rule. That's when the second player on their first turn can either make a move or switch colors.

Out of the three games that I'm going to talk about, Hex is oldest and really the best. However, it is also a very unforgiving abstract. The better player will always win unless someone is hitting them over the head with a hammer.

Quite frankly, if you don't like abstracts and you want at least a little bit of luck in your games, then you're better off giving Hex is a miss.

The next game that I want to recommend is Reiner Knizia'' Decathlon. Yes, I don't seem to be able to write about or games without mentioning Reiner Knizia. It will happen someday though, I promise.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6955/reiner-knizias-decathlon

The Decathlon is a series of little dice game, each one for a different event. While they all can be compared to Yahtzee, each one has its own twists and has at least a little to do with the actual athletic event.

Different folks have formatted in ways over the years. Still, all you need is a print out or two of the rules and scoring sheets, plus eight dice and a pencil to keep track of the score.

It's not Knizia's best game but it is his best free game and a fun little dice chucked. If you're even a little interested, it's super easy to try out and you can even play it solitaire.

The last game I want to mention is Pagoda, which is an abstract that uses dice for the pawns, with a little dice rolling thrown in for good measure. It was originally a published game but the publishers have now released it as a free game that you can make yourself.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3213/pagoda

You play Pagoda on a circular board that shows the bird's eye view of a mountain with a pagoda on the top. Your goal is to have your five dice trace of line from the bottom of the mountain up to the top and back down again.

What makes the game interesting is that the pips on the dice determine if the dice is a worm, a goat, a human or Buddha. You start off with one worm, two goats and two humans. However, every time a pawn dies, you reroll it to reincarnate it.

(The six is the Buddha, by the way, who you can only achieve by reincarnation. The Buddha is not placed on the board but is considered to be on any one space. So, if you somehow ended up with five sixes, you would automatically win.)

While I would not consider Pagoda to be as strong as either Hex or Reiner Knizia's Decathlon, since it can end up bogged down, I do really like the reincarnation mechanic. It gives the game very unique feel. Plus, it's pretty good for a game that you just have to print out one page for the board and add ten dice.

As I mentioned before, print and play is very much a niche in the gaming hobby. Some projects can end up being quite a bit of work and many projects can end up not being worth playing. However, there is enough out there that can be fun, even without a lot of work.

Roll and move rears its ugly head

My son got a copy of 'If You Give A Mouse A Cookie' at the Tucson Festival of Books that came with a tear out board game. And, even though I knew better, I thought that was cool.

And, of course, it was a roll and move (surprise!)

(And, for the record, I know it was the version of Mouse that was in Happy Meals a while back. I was happy, from a parent-viewpoint, that it did have the original text and pictures)

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you actually do. I talking about games where you roll dice and move that many spaces on a track. No choices or decisions. Just blindly obey the dice.

Roll and move is the bane of gamers. I know some people will argue that themed Monopoly or the Chick Tract Dark Dungeons is the bane of gamers everywhere but it's really roll and move.

In particular, I blame of the Game of Goose. 

It didn't invent roll and move. Oh no. Roll and move has been around thousands of years with games like Backgammon or Parcheesi. But those games give you multiple pawns so you do have real choices. Backgammon even lets you move multiple pawns in a turn so it goes from being mindless to really deep.

And I'm pretty sure the Game of Goose didn't even invent just having one pawn and no choices. (Oh, wouldn't that be Snakes and Ladders?) But it definitely helped popularize the idea and has been spreading the idea around since 1590. And it started out as a gambling game, not a game for kiddies :0

Of course, it has become the standard format for any cheap kids game, particularly one with some cartoon character slapped in it for theme. I've heard that it has gotten better in recent years and I'll be finding that out in a few years when my son gets older.

But, seriously, even Candy Land also teaches kids colors and how to stack a deck of cards. The best roll and move teaches is counting, taking turns and that life isn't fair. Frankly, roll and move is going to teach kids that games are boring and need to be avoided.

Of course, in this case, I still get to read my son 'If You Give A Mouse A Cookie'

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_the_Goose

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Give_a_Mouse_a_Cookie

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2397/backgammon

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2785/game-goose

Advancing from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age

I just picked up a barely used copy of Roll Through the Ages: The Iron Age. It even had the Mediterranean expansion, which I don't think is standard. (Maybe it is. I could be wrong) I'm definitely going to try it out solo and maybe even get some multi-player in.

But it does make me want to revisit its older, smaller brother.

Although, to be fair, it's not like I've ever really left it. I've almost always had at least one game of it going on Yucata for years. When Nations the Dice Game got added, that just gave me two different dice games about civilization building to play online. :D

(I have to say that as much as I enjoy Roll Through the Ages, it doesn't truly feel like a legitimate civilization game to me. Like other civ – light games that I enjoy, like Nations the Dice Game or 7 Wonders, the scope doesn't seem broad enough to truly feel like I am developing a civilization over a swath of history. (Interestingly enough, Settlers of the Stone Age does work for me as a civ – light game, possibly because it covers the entire world.) I don't know if the Iron Age will feel more like I am actually developing a civilization over the ages.)

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age's core mechanic is Yahtzee, which is not uncommon. On your turn, you roll the dice and you get two rerolls. The faces on the dice can give you workers to build stuff (including more cities to get more dice), food to feed cities, goods to buy advances and dreaded skulls that bring down disasters on your civilization.

While part of the reason why the original Roll Through the Ages has both stayed in my collection and been in study rotation on Yucata for me is that it is a light, Yahtzee-inspired dice game that is both easy to teach and something that I can play even when I am feeling brain-dead, it does have some touches that make it nifty and give it its own feel.

I like the disasters. In Civilization and Advanced Civilization, juggling and coping with calamities is one of the major features of the game. I like how the disasters in the original Roll Through the Ages don't just wipe out your turn but have some kind of effect. There's a flavor to them and different ways of coping with them.

More importantly, I like the advances. For me, one of the defining characteristics of a civilization game is the tech tree. And, while Roll Through the Ages lacks the grandeur and the breadth of a true civilization game for me, it does have a tech tree. If the game was just about checking off boxes to get points, it would not be nearly as interesting or have any flavor. Instead, the advances give you special powers that what you plan out in shape your game, at least as much as the dice will let you.

After just one game of the Iron Age version of the game, I can tell that the decision tree is a lot more complicated then the Bronze Age. As I've said, a big part of the Bronze Age has seen so much play for me is because it is simple. I am going to have to see if the more intricate design of the Iron Age is a good trade-off for that simplicity.

So, more plays.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/23986/roll-through-ages