Rome Must Fall explores the logistics of war in one page

 I have really been meaning to look at Martin Melbardis and their company Solo Wargame. Specifically the Roll and Write war games. I’ve actually backed a few on Kickstarter and just needed to find the time/headspace to try them. Looking through the ones I have, Rome Must Fall seemed like the most newbie friendly so that’s what I started with.

I have to say that Print and Play war games have been around for a while. I think they might have been one of the earliest genres to get adopted. You can find Chit-and-Hex PnP games that are decades old. Heck, Malta Convoy is a roll and write war game from 2001. 

However, Solo Wargame’s mission statement seems to be to create PnP games that have the convenience of Roll and Write but have some heavier meat to them. I like Postmark Game’s Battle Card series but they are very light exercises.

Despite the name, you are actually trying to hold the Roman empire together in Rome Must Fall. The game is set in 425 AD and you are dealing with threats on… well, just about every side. 

You are dealing with six different fronts in the game, four barbarian forces and two raiders. Every loss to the barbarians makes you lose territory while losing to the raiders will cost you some form of resources.

The core mechanic is dice allocation. You roll six dice. You assigned them to each front. Then, the invading forces get to roll against you. 

You have a limited number of reserve tokens that you can use to increase your die, as well as limited access to some special abilities. Not only do you have to roll sixes to be able to use the special abilities each one is tied to a city on the map. If that city gets sacked, you lose that ability.

And, just to make sure it hurts, your six sided dice can get reduced to three-sided dice by certain losses.

If you lose too many key cities, you lose the game. If you can survive 12 turns, you win the game.

Simply put, you can’t win every fight. You have to pick your battles carefully and figure out what you can afford to lose. Your resources are going to get more and more scarce as the game goes on. Years ago, a friend told me that Advanced Civilization was about managing calamities over six hours. Rome Must Fall gives you that experience on one page in fifteen minutes.

To be honest, I haven’t played enough to figure out how much luck determines if you’re going to survive. I haven’t survived yet.

That being said, and I mean this as a compliment, Rome Must Fall feels like an older brother to the Battle Card series. It serves as both a small war game and a history lesson. However, while I feel that there is an optimal path in those games, there is too much going on in Rome Must Fall to have a single, scripted strategy. 

Rome Must Fall is a budget friendly, accessible experience. It is fraught with tension as you do your best to slow down the death spiral that is baked into the game. I’m glad I looked into Solo Wargame.

66 fleurs de printemp just doesn’t fit for me

I want to start off with thanking Accessijeux for letting games published for their charity out into the wild and Benjamin Cronshaw for translating the rules into English.

66 fleurs de printemps, 66 Flowers of Spring, is the third game in a series of season-themed Roll and Write games that were originally published for charity. 

It follows the general formula of all the games in the series. Each turn, you roll three dice and assign them in different ways. 

The first die is assigned to one of the five different mini games, all of which are season-themed. The second die causes a weather event to go off, which gives you some kind of bonus. The last die goes to the flower tracks, which is cumulative. The game ends either when someone’s track reaches 66 or either twenty turns, whatever comes first. Most points wins.

By this point, I’ve played all four of the games In the series, including the summer game. And Spring Flowers is currently my least favorite game in the series and I don’t see that changing soon.

Part of that is because I found it the most confusing. In particular, the plant mini game where you use a weather event to grow the plants. I wasn’t sure if you automatically got points and had to grow plants just for admittedly strong bonuses or if you had to grow them for the points as well. Does every plant you’ve started grow when it rains or do you do have to pick just one. I think I’ve figured it out but I won’t be surprised if I’m wrong. 

However, beyond learning pains, I found that the weather events were only about getting bonus points. Some of them were almost like separate mini games. Admittedly, some of them increase multiplayer competition, which is good. In 16 Lights and 62 Suns, the bonus elements, which include forms of dice manipulation, are part of the main gameplay. In 66 Flowers, they feel like an add on.

(61 Leaves doesn’t really have extra elements but its simplicity is part of its charms)

Don’t get me wrong. 66 Flowers is a solid design. And I very much appreciate how each game in the series isn’t the exact same game with different artwork. In fact, 66 Flowers with the weather events may be the most unique game in the series. However, I still don’t enjoy it as much as the others.

My August PnP

 August was a busy month, which I honestly think will be the pattern until at least the holidays. I got some small projects in. In fact my big project was a whole bunch of little things.

I made:

Rolling Thunder 

Paper App: Dungeon (maps 1-7)

Flipuzzles (2021 & 2024 sets)

One Page Mazes (Season 4 exclusives plus  a few odds and ends)

Master of Coin (eras I & II)

Poker Squares

Voyages (Maps 1&2)

Aquamarine (2 copies of Map 1)

My big project for August was making a bunch of puzzles that are each one card. I made pretty much all the Flipuzzles that I have access to and several pages of One Card Mazes. Both series are mazes that you follow with your mind’s eye.

And they have already proven to be a good build. They are perfect for when I am stuck waiting in the car, particularly when it’s so hot that I’m worried that my phone will overheat (which has happened) I prefer One Card Mazes because it’s easier to keep my place in them but variety is good when you fidgeting to stay sane.

Beyond that, it was one-page Roll and Writes, including making slightly larger versions of some of the maps of Voyages and Aquamarine. (I made two copies of the Aquamarine for multiplayer play)

I haven’t tried Master of Coin yet but I think I’ll enjoy it more than the 52 Realms games. 

I make and play games for fun and for intellectual engagement but I also do it for decompression. This month’s builds? Very decompression oriented.

Packing Party is too colorful for me but I like its interaction

 I have slightly mixed feelings about Packing Party. On the down side, it feels weak to me compared to what I’ve come to expect Shiny Pigeon Games. Two of their games, Around the World in 10-15 Minutes and Beards and Booty, feel like games out of a box, not a printer. They are games I regularly recommend. Packing Party, on the urged hand, feels like a PnP R&W. 

On the other hand, Packing Party is a pretty solid PnP R&W.

My actual biggest beef with it is that it requires six different colors. Not only am I colorblind, I normally only keep four different colors of dry erase markers around. (I ended up using patterns as well as colors)

The game is about packing up boxes. In Moving Day, the one I’ve been playing, you are packing boxes for a move. In Santa’s Helpers, you’re packing gifts for foster kids.

The actual mechanics are drawing shapes in grids. It’s a good thing I like doing that since I honestly think I’ve literally played over a hundred games with that mechanic. So, what does Packing Party do to make it not just be another tree in the vast forest?

In Packing Party, you are filling three different-sized grids. And you are filling them out with six different colors. 

The core mechanic is actually drafting. You lay out the colored writing utensils in a specific order. You roll the dice one at a time, assigning them in order to the pens. Then, you draft them. The pip determines the shape so you are drafting for color and shape.

In Moving Day, there are two ways to score points. Boxes score points for the number of different colors. You also have to pick a color for each box (in game terms, label what room the box is for) and you will score points based on that specific color. You can label the boxes at the end of the game but you can earn bonus points doing it earlier.

The game ends when either someone labels their third box or everyone passes in a row. Most points wins.

Other nice touches: There are one-shot special powers. There are six and three are available per game. There are advanced sheets where you randomly determine the pip shapes. There’s a solo mode that simulates the draft. You have some control over what the dice get taken away but not total control.

In short, while Packing Party doesn’t break any new ground and, if you’re used to gaming, the mechanics will be comfortably familiar. However, it does more than just have you fill in a grid. How you fill it in matters. It is simple but there are layers to the decisions. 

More than that, by having a draft as a core mechanic, it has legitimate player interaction. So many R&W are solitaires you play next to other people. Or with no one. In Packing Party, your choices affect other people. That’s it’s real standout quality.

As I said before, my honest problem with the game is that I have very limited color vision. I laminate sheets and use dry erase markers for games I plan on using more than once. With the standard colors that are easy to get, the black and the blue look alike to me, as do the red and green. Playing Packing Party gives me eye strain.

Which isn’t a real knock against the game. I can find dry erase markers with enough contrast if I wanted to. It’s not as big a problem for me as the original five-to-six player expansion for Catan, which added brown and green. With the original red, half the options were identical to me!

Ultimately, while it’s a game I physically struggle with and I don’t think is as strong as other Shiny Pigeon games, I do think that does its job well, particularly because it has that solid player interaction.

Which means I will be trying out the other version, Santa’s Helpers, before Christmas.

Sink the Bismarck is a celebration of the inevitability of failure

 Sink the Bismarck is a hit of a historical oddity to me.

I remember seeing it years ago, close to when it originally came out. At that time, I was vaguely aware of Print and Play but it wasn’t any kind of focus for me. I am under the impression that a higher percentage of Print and Plays were war games at the time but I could be totally wrong.

A lot of the ‘early’ print and play war games that I looked at back in the day were hex and chit. Sink the Bismarck is actually more of a push-your-luck game.

The game is about the 1941 sinking of the German battleship Bismarck by the British Royal Navy. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, this was a turning point in the naval part of World War II.

You take on the roll of the Bismarck’s defenders, trying to shoot down the planes and torpedoes that will eventually sink her. There is no winning condition. The battleship is going to sink. You are just trying to see how much at the enemy, you can shoot down before it happens.

The version of the board that I used was simple line art of four tracks leading to the doomed battleship. The last two spaces on each track are where the plane tokens turn into torpedo tokens. Which are harder to hit.

Roll two dice to see if and where two British planes are going to enter the tracks. Place four dice on the track where you think planes or torpedoes are going to move. Roll dice for each plane to see if they go left, right, or straight as they moved down. Any placed die that has a plane or torpedo in the same space to see if you hit it. (Planes get hit on fives and sixes. Torpedos require sixes) Repeat until the Bismarck gets hit five times and sinks.

That’s pretty much the rules. You get 1 point for every plane you shoot down. You get five points for every torpedo you shoot down. Try and beat your best score.

BGG user C Hansen compared Sink the Bismarck to an old school video game and I think they really nailed it. More than anything else, it feels like an adaptation of Space Invaders, despite its historic theme. (I do appreciate it when a game gives you a history lesson though)

The gameplay is very simple and luck-based. In some cases, you can make some very good guesses on dice placement. Planes on the edges are going to go straight down 2/3 of the time and torpedoes just go straight down. But then you have to roll a five or a six or just a six. No way to modify that.

On the positive side, the game delivers the  tension. The planes and torpedos just keep coming and their numbers just keep growing. Failure may be inevitable but trying to stave it off is fun. Honestly, more fun than it has any right to be.

Sink the Bismarck’s strongest selling point it has really minimal construction requirements. One page board with very minimal ink. I just used cubes instead making the airplane/torpedo chits. And I do have plenty of dice around.

Sink the Bismarck has so-so mechanics but remarkably strong tone. The opportunity cost is so low that It doesn’t hurt to try it out.

Hey, you can download Flipuzzle again!

 After trying out Chutes and Levers, I decided that I wanted to revisit Flipuzzles. That series was the first set of puzzles I discovered that involved flipping and rotating a card and nothing else. 

The only component is the card itself. As you follow some sort of path on grid, you have to keep a track of where you are in your head. For me, at least, that can be quite tricky.

There are a variety of Flipuzzles. Let me compare and contrast a couple examples. 

The most basic one is Maze. You have a grid of different colored squares. You can move one space at a time. If you move up and down, you flip the card longways. If you move left or right, you flip it sideways. Either way, you are in the same coordinates on the other side of the card. In Maze, you need to find a path of the same colored tiles from the beginning point to the end.

All of the Flipuzzles follow this basic template. You are finding a path by flipping the card in different ways.

The other example I want to show is Chess. In Chess, your movements are controlled by what chess piece you are on and you have have to land on other chess pieces. The reason I picked Chess as an example is because l thought not would be one of the hardest to parse but I actually found it to be the easiest. It also shows how variety can be added to the basic formula.

Flipuzzles started out as a design contest entry called Thin Cube, one card that acted a bit like a Rubiks Cube. (Extra thanks to D. Teuber who sent me a colorblind friendly version so I could actually play it) Then, for a short time, there was a collection of eighteen puzzles in seven different flavors available for download.

That went away because Button Shy licensed the system for the subscribers. I wasn’t one at the time but I hope the puzzles made for Button Shy get released sometime.

Then, after Chutes and Levers reminded me of the series’ existence, I went back to its BGG entry and found a new set of nine puzzles had been released in 2024! So now I can recommend Flipuzzles again.

One Card Mazes remains my favorite form of this sort of puzzle. I find them intuitive to parse but still tough to solve. And I’m apparently not alone since they’ve had four successful Kickstarters.

However, Flipuzzles is still an interesting system with a lot of variety. It’s also the most intricate single card puzzle system I’ve seen. Now that you can check it out, it’s worth checking out.

Is it bad when my first reaction is ‘I’ve seen better’?

 I picked up Chutes and Levers as part of a Kickstart campaign. It’s a set of one-card puzzles where you have to rotate and flip the card as you mentally keep track of where you are.

Which makes it at least the third set of puzzles like that I’ve looked at. Flipuzzles and One-Card Mazes are the other two. And, in case this as far as you read, I honestly consider Chutes and Levers to be a distant third.

Chutes and Levers is themed around platforming video games. Each card is a maze with a distinct beginning and end point. Your goal is to move from the first to the latter.

You can only move left. You can jump over one-space gaps and jump up one space. If you go though an opening on one side of the card, you warp to the other side. If you are in a space with a lever in the lower right corner, you can turn the card 90 degrees clockwise. If you are in a space with a chute, you can flip the card to the other side.

The theming is a strong element, maybe one of the strongest elements. By framing the puzzles as video games, the mechanics become very intuitive. The puzzles are even broken down into worlds, 1-1, 1-2, etc., reminding us that it’s Mario’s world. The rest of us just live here.

However, compared to the other two system, I find Chutes and Levers much more limited. The restrictions are wonderfully thematic but they also make the puzzles feel very similar.

In comparison, Flipuzzles are very inventive and have a lot of rich variety, even if they make my head hurt. And I am amazed at how One-Card mazes reinvent themselves to the point where I always have at least one in my wallet.

Chutes and Levers is charming. And some of the puzzles are stumping me and probably will for a while. If you want a wide variety of card-based puzzles, they are worth adding to the library. But I think there is better stuff out there.

My July PnP

 July was the month when I knew I would have some time for gaming related stuff. So, it was a pretty heavy PnP month by my standards.

I made:

Quiltable: Oversewn

Quiltable: Garden Patch

Thermopylae: Last Stand

Rome Must Fall

Operation Barbarossa (Solo Wargame)

Lunch Box Lair

Dice on Mars

Around South America in 15 Minutes

Packing Party - Santa’s Helpers

Catan Dice

Jurassico

Raging Bulls

Fast Train to Moyatima 

Raft 

Midtown Mall

Tanuki Matsuri 

Malta Convoy

Chutes and Levers

Squeaky Clean

Starspeaker

My ‘big’ project was Lunchbox Lair. Unfortunately, I found it disappointing. Which happens but Alexander Shen’s track record for me is still very high. 

That being said, I laminated a lot of Roll and Writes. Some were quite, simple. Raft is one of the simplest games I’ve played in a while and I wouldn’t mind seeing it getting a following. On the other hand, some, like the Solo War Games games had some meat.

I also wanted to reset and buff up some of my clipboards of Roll and Writes. It’s good to learn new stuff but it’s good to revisit games I thought were good.

And, near the end of the month, I made copies of Squeaky Clean and Chutes and Levers from a Kickstarter, which were slightly larger projects.

I am sure August will be a much busier month that won’t have as much time for game related stuff so I’m happy for July.