Dice Flow is a fun little math

 Alexander Shen has an amazing knack for making neat little games and puzzles. They’re never big or impressive but they are always interesting and quite often fun and distracting. Shen has done my sanity a lot of good over the years.

Dice Flow is a roll and write that consists of two math processes. I can’t call them equations proper, although each one is made up of equations. In both cases, you roll six dice and pop the numbers in to figure out a final number. Add the two final numbers together to get your score.

Not only does that sounds kind of complex, the actual play sheet itself looks kind of complex. However, Shen’s silly cartoon characters (Hi, Sadie Cat!) explain everything pretty clearly. One play through, which shouldn’t even take five minutes, and everything makes sense.

I am not going to actually go through the actual maths. For one thing, it would feel fussy. For another thing, that would just be giving you the game.

I went into Dice Flow with very low expectations. It looks like (and flat out is) just some math problems. I wondered if there were any choices at all in it. I felt like, at most, it might be something I might use in the classroom.

However, where you plug numbers in makes a big difference. I sometimes use a dice roller on my phone but Dice Flow is one of those games where I like using physical dice so I can rearrange the numbers. 

And I was surprised to find that I enjoyed doing this bit of number juggling. It probably doesn’t hurt that it really isn’t that complex and only takes a couple of minutes to bang out a play. It definitely doesn’t outstay in welcome.

Now, on the downside; even by Shen standards, Dice Flow is a very light game. More than that, while you do have to make some decisions, it’s not hard to optimize your die rolls. I enjoy the little that it is but there is very little.

However, it’s a free, one-page game. Honestly, I have already gotten more out of it than it took to make a laminated copy. It’s a nice little brain break. If they make more Dice Flow pages, I’ll play them.

https://alexandershen.itch.io/dice-flow-vol-1

Murderer’s Row - Tiny but tons of replay value

Murderer’s Row is a Print-and-Play solitaire game that hits a lot of sweet spots for me. 

One of my sins as a PnP solitaire player is that I usually don’t set aside time to play solitaire games. I just play them when I find I have a few minutes so I play a lot more games that are just cards or tiles that I can just shuffle and go and be done in five minutes.  

Murderer’s Row fits that bill ridiculously well.

The game consists of eighteen cards, each one showing a person/profession and a special power. Most of the special powers are about killing other cards but some of them involve moving cards or resetting them.

Shuffle the deck and deal out ten cards in a row. Then, using their powers, you have to kill everyone until there’s only one card left. Last man standing. (And it is theoretically possible to actually have _no_ cards left) And, every time you use a power, you flip that card over to indicate that it’s exhausted.

Between what cards come out and the order they come out, there is a lot of variability in the game. And, yes, the position of the cards is a big deal since the powers are very specific. For instance, the Swordsman can only kill an active card that is beside it.

My absolute least favorite type of card is the couple that kill a random card. After I get my random setup, I want to be able to solve the layout and killing a random card doesn’t fit into making real plans.

I have gotten an obnoxious amount of play out of Murderer’s Row. I made the half-size, simple art deck, which is small enough that I can play it just about anywhere. I could probably play it in my hand, fanning the cards. And I’ll probably will make the Birds on a Wire so I have a copy for my bag and a larger copy for around the house.

Murderer’s Row isn’t a deep or heavy game. But it does give me a seemingly endless series of little puzzles to spend a couple minutes solving. Between ease of crafting and play, it’s a game that I definitely recommend for PnP.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/185813/murderers-row

Looking at my April PnP

Wow. It’s already May. April flew on by, at least as far as my Print-and-Play crafting was  concerned.

In April, I crafted Space Strips, I Know An Old Lady, Darlin’ Corey (an RPG), (your name) and the Argonauts, Prince Of Pies, The Architect, Dragon Punch and Down. None of them were large projects. Really, they were all small projects. One of them, Darlin’ Corey, is only three cards. And almost all of it was done in a couple crafting sessions.

I had planned on doing more crafting than that but life does have a way of getting in the way of those kind of plans. Eh, I bet this is not going to my worst month for PnP this year.

I ended the month with six projects in some state of production, not counting the stack of stuff I’ve just printed but not done anything else with. If I just complete those six projects in May, I’ll have gone through more sheets of components than everything I crafted in April :D

And I have to say that I keep finding interesting stuff to craft.

Initial thoughts about the Architect

Despite being exactly what I thought it would be, The Architect managed to surprise me.

The Architect is a free PnP game consisting of eighteen cards where you are designing the blueprint for a home. The artwork is seriously minimalist, just simple lines and squares. (Which is still quite effective since that is evocative of blue prints.) All in all, it’s an easy, very ink friendly build.

It’s a solitaire tile-laying game, draw a card, place a card. You know the routine. The placement restrictions are that the support columns must form a grid. Beyond that, you can overlap cards, turn cards sideways and even slide cards under other cards. You need to create a central corridor. You get points for rooms directly off the corridor but you lose points for big holes in the outer walls, doors that open into walls and rooms you can’t get into.

Here’s where The Architect surprised me. Even with the really open placement rules, I found the game surprisingly hard. I went into my first game, thinking it would be easy and I ended up completely messing up the central corridor.

I did much better on my second game and I might be done with the game after ten or so plays. But if I get that much play out of a free PnP micro game, I feel that’s really good.

There’s apparently plans to make a multi-player version, which I’m curious about. In the solitaire version, you have two cards with double doors that you can place anytime that define the central corridor. I can picture each player having their own set, turning the game into a vicious fight.

I have a feeling I’ll be writing about the Architect again. It might fizzle out quickly or it might get more interesting the more I play it. However, I went expecting meh and it surprised me.

Cabbage Quest - mechanically slight but thematically rich

Cabbage Quest was an entry in the 2016 Children’s Print and Play Game Design Contest on Boardgame Geek. It doesn’t actually an entry on the Geek but I came across enough references to people crafting that I decided to to try it myself. It didn’t hurt that it only required printing three pages and no other construction.

Cabbage Quest is a solitaire game where you play someone in a fairy tale world who accidentally ate three cursed cabbages and got transformed into a donkey. Now you need to break into magical gardens and try to eat three enchanted cabbages to turn back into a human being.

Basically, Cabbage Quest is like a very short Fighting Fantasy game book. You stat out your donkey by assigning 1, 2 and 3 to kick, bite and stubbornness. Plus, you get three points in determination, which serves as your health points. Lose them all and you’ve given up, deciding to live your life as a donkey.

Since what skill you will need on any given area is randomly determined with an equal chance for each skill, I’m not sure if there is meaningful difference which stat gets which number. However, you get a different special, one-time use ability based on what you assign the 1 to.

The map consists of four magic gardens that are increasingly difficult. Each garden consists of four tables: one that determines the skill challenge to get in; one that determines the results of the cabbage you eat; one that determines if the wizard or witch who owns the garden sees you (the chances go up the more cabbages you eat); and one that determines the skill challenge if the garden owner does see you.

Mechanically, the actual game part of Cabbage Quest is a push-your-luck game. The real decisions are how many cabbages will you eat in each garden and how dangerous a garden will you break into, since the more dangerous ones have better cabbage odds. Really, from a mechanical, game standpoint, Cabbage Quest isn’t that interesting.

HOWEVER, what makes Cabbage Quest interesting and fun is the theme. This short, little game is positively dripping in well written, fairy tale theme. The game may be at the mercy of the dice but you always get a fun fairy tale story.

Cabbage Quest is an odd beast. It’s a contest entry that never really went past the beta stage. However, the flavor text is so charming and well written, it has stayed on peoples’ radar, as opposed to sinking out of sight. 

And it’s on my radar as a children’s game when my son gets older. It’s amusing and charming for adults but it might be really engaging for kids.

Cabbage Quest is, at best, so-so as a game. It’s not a game I’d play over and over. However, the theme does such a good job that it was worth printing those three pages.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1668429/wip-cabbage-quest-2016-childrens-game-print-and-pl

Playing in the Autumn leaves

I have been trying out the PnP game Autumn. It’s a small, eighteen card build that requires nothing but the cards, although there are two different decks: one for two players and one for three players.

Autumn, the first in a four-game series (I bet you can guess what the other three games will be and Winter has already been produced), is a very simple tile laying game. Each card is broken down into four quadrants, each one showing a pile of leaves. There’s two different types of leaves for two-players and three for three-players. 

The basic idea of the game is dead simple. Draw a card and place a card on the table as part of a growing tableau/map of leaves. Everyone has their own type of leaves and you score your biggest group, most points winning.

And if that was it, then Autumn wouldn’t be very interesting. I mean, that is one of the most basic tile-laying concepts you can come up with. If that’s all there was, it wouldn’t be bringing anything new to the party.

Fortunately, the game has a couple of interesting flourishes.

The first, and it certainly not a unique or innovative idea, is that it uses the pie rule to determine who has what color/leaf type. Like I said, this isn’t anything amazing or new. But it does add a little bit of depth to the game.

Second, and much more interesting, you don’t match edges. Instead, every placement must cover one or two quadrants that are already in play. First of all, that’s more unusual which is fun. Second of all, that creates a greater number of choices. It also means that blocking is more flexible, creating a more confrontational and interesting game.

I’ve only played it solitaire so far. One-player mode uses the same placement rules but your score is the third largest group. So it still creates some interesting choices.

However, having now logged some solitaire plays, I think it’d be worth trying multi-player. In fact, given the fact that I think blocking will be interesting, I think that’s where the game’s real strength will be.

Now, Autumn is an eighteen-card micro game. And while I truly believe that are some micro games that stretch and test the limits of what a micro game can be, Autumn is not one of them. It is a quick little game that feels eighteen cards big.

I don’t know how much replay value Autumn has. However, it’s a game that took a minimum effort to make. I’ll get more than enough play out of it for what it took to make it. Plus, it is tiny enough that I can easily carry it in my bag. If I double-side it so the two-player deck is on one side and the three-player is on the other, it’s a travel game for one to three players.

Autumn is not a top-tier, change-your-life print and play game. However, I would say that it is pretty solidly in the second tier. If you are like me and a relatively lazy game crafter, it is well worth the making.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/185244/autumn

Binging on PnP

The other night, I noticed that I had been printing out PnP projects but I hadn’t actually been getting around to making any of them. To be fair, December was pretty crazy and I did spend half of it in other states. In fact, my last crafting was for the Mini PnP Secret Santa (which was a blast and totally worth doing)

So, I sat down and started cutting, followed by laminating and then more cutting. None of the projects were remotely big but I really had let them pile up.

Over the course of a couple days, I have made copies of Pentaquark, Jasper and Zot, Elevens for One, Pocket Landship with the Second Front Expansion, Garden of Zen, Zone Runners, Bento Blocks, Raiders in My Pocket, and the original edition of The Name of God (which is a micro RPG)

Some of these games are ones I’ve made before but I’ve given the earlier copies away. And, in some cases, I’ve also gotten better at crafting since I made the first copies too :D

Raiders in My Pocket was easily the most annoying to craft. When I first printed it out, I thought it was really neat that they fit all the tiles and cards, plus the tokens, on one sheet of paper. However, in reality, that means all the pieces are really tiny which make them a pain to cut. That might also make them hard to use too.

I also want to note that I made a copy of the first edition of the Name of God, as opposed to the greatly expanded and much more colorful second edition, because it consists of basically six cards and minimal, ink friendly art. I eventually will make a nice copy of the second edition but I now have a good RPG that game can fit in its entirety in my wallet.

I doubt that this will be the shape of things to come, that I’ll end up crafting a whole bunch of games all at once on a regular basis. However, over the last few years, I have been doing more and more PnP crafting. And I’ve gotten into PnP solitaire games more and more. So we will see what 2018 holds in store.

Elevenses-For-One, surprisingly fun for organizing a tea cart

My recent kick of making Print-and-Play solitaire games got started with Elevenses-For-One, the thematic sequel to Elevenses, which I've never actually played.

11s-4-1 (an abbreviation that makes the game sound like its about filling out tax forms) was well regarded as a Print-and-Play, nominated for a Golden Geek in 2014. So I made sure to download the files for my records. However, when it got Kickstarted, I decided it was time to take a closer look.

Thirteen cards, including the two timer cards. Cut out the cards and laminate them, boom, done. Low ink images, five minutes of crafting and probably not even a quarter's worth of materials. And there not even any extra parts like dice or tokens.

In 11a-4-1, you play the role of an Edwardian maid who has to get a tea cart ready in fifteen minutes. Which reminds me that I still haven't made good on my promise to my mom to watch Dowton Abbey.

Two of the cards serve as a timer and the number 1 card, the tea trolley, acts as a place holder for stacking the cards. The actual gameplay is made up of the other ten cards, makes 2 to 11. You're trying to put them in numeric order after shuffling them into a row. They all have special powers, some of which will hurt you. You rearrange the cards by doing things like discarding them or flipping them over to use their powers or actually adding them to the stack. Most actions will tick the clock down a notch.

The game will end with either the clock running out or getting all the cards down, with your score based on how many cards you stacked up and how much time you have left.

It amuses me that, when you strip away the hoighty toighty theme and the special powers of the cards, you have the perfectly standard solitaire framework of putting cards in order. Not that that is a bad thing. A solid foundation is important.

And, while solitaire games aren't really my thing, I found 11s-4-1 to be an interesting little five-minute puzzle. Fun and easy to craft and amusing to play.

I don't see myself buying the game when it comes out in punished form but I figure I will keep playing it occasionally.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158882/elevenses-one

If I play solitaire game, I probably crafted it myself

I have been working on making print-and-play copies of Elevenses-For-One and the chit version of Bowling Solitaire when I realized that most of the solitaire games I've played have been ones that I've made myself. In fact, with the exceptions of Onirim and  Friday, I can't think of any that I've bought.

As a rule, I'm not a solitaire player. I'm not even that into playing against AIs. However, over the years, I have ended up playing a number of solitaire games. And, like I said, most of them have been ones I've made in the name of print-and-play.

Looking back, I'm pretty sure the first one I made and played was Malta Convoy. And by made, I mean printed and and got out some dice. The game simulates the WW II American convoy to deliver supplies to Malta. However, you really just roll the dice to see what happens. It tells a story but it doesn't really offer much in the way of choices. It's biggest virtue is that you just need to print one page.

Of course, there are a lot of solitaire games out there that fit that criteria now.

The solitaire Print-and-Play I've gotten the most play out of, beating out even Onirim, is easily Zombie In My Pocket. Tile laying, resource and time management, and a very strong theme. It is a fun little game.

A solitaire card or board game is a combination of puzzle solving, imagination and wool gathering. It's a mixture of meditation and killing time. The process of actually making it just adds to both of those aspects. 

I'll freely admit that I tend to make ones with minimal components. And certainly not all of them are winners. Sometimes, they're just interesting ideas to look at, even if they weren't actually interesting to play.

However, crafting a solitaire game adds to the entire experience. It is a game that you play on your own. Making it yourself brings the experience full circle, making it self-contained and entirely your own.

Arts and Crafts leads to game crafting

In our house, arts and crafts often crosses with gaming. My wife is a crafty woman, whose interests include chainmail and Cricut paperwork. I am a print-and-play dabbler with the paper cutter in the laminator being some of my biggest tools after the printer.

My wife just picked up a punch that will not just punched out pieces of paper in the shape of buttons, the kind that you find on dress shirts, but emboss them as well. You get a raised circle that is the outline of the button.

This doesn't just look neat, although it does do that. The punch allows you to make discs out of any color card stock you happen to have lying around, and we have plenty, that are both much easier to pick up then a flat disc and stack nicely.

In other words, they are ideal for creating playing pieces or tokens for any number of games. Since they are paper, I could also use a small stamp to add symbols to them. You know, like numbers.

Of course, as someone who has been doing print-and-play projects for years, I already have poker chips in different colors and different sizes that do that job nicely. And, for that matter, are a whole lot more durable.

Still, if I want tokens or playing pieces of very specific colors and I don't mind that they will have a very short lifespan, this button punch will come in handy. Oh, whom I kidding? I'm already looking for some project that will give me an excuse to use it.

On the one hand, the lesson that I might be getting from this is that, if you are into print-and-play projects, everything starts looking like something that you can use. On the other hand, the lesson might be that there are some really cool arts and crafts stuff out there.

Exploring lamination with Micropul

Ever since we got a laminator, I have been testing out what I can do with it as far is print and play projects are concerned. In actuality, it has actually exceeded my expectations.

The first 'real' project I tried with the laminator was making a set of laminated Micropul tiles. Everything else that I've done up until this point was just to see how it would do, without actually worrying about ending up with a game that I would want to play.

(Well, the first thing I tried was making laminated cards for Button Men, which is a game I like. However, that just makes nice cards. I don't need them to play the game. A friend of mine and I used to play Button Men with just dice and printed out spreadsheet of various buttons)

Micropul is a relatively old print and play game. It first came out over 10 years ago. Part of what has to have given legs is that it is a very simple project make. All you need is to make one page of tiles and some tokens of some kind. However, it's also pretty decent game which has to be the biggest part of why it is still part of the print and play scene.

It's a tile-laying game where you try to claim and close groups of symbols, not unlike farming scoring in Carcassonne. And if that's all there was to it, it wouldn't be that much.

However, unlike most tile-laying games, you don't draw tiles as part of your turn. You have to activate special symbols on the tiles to get tiles. Unused tiles at the end of the game are worth points. That's a pretty good twist.

What I decided to try doing was laminating the sheet of tiles and then cutting them out. I did this, even though I didn't think it would work.

Now, I haven't dealt with lamination in probably over 20 years. My memories of old laminators were that they would basically create a plastic sandwich around the paper with the edges being sealed. If you broke the seal that the edges made, everything would fall apart.

I have some sort of crazy memory of lamination paper that was actually clear plastic with the sticky side and you would make a sandwich out of two of them. But I never used anything like that and I don't know if it actually exists in any place other than my imagination.

I had some hoped that the heated plastic of modern lamination pouches would actually adhere to the paper but I didn't really expect that to be the case. The quality of the plastic has definitely improved and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the actual laminators are hotter.

Lo and behold, the plastic actually did adhere to the paper. Instead of having to cut out the tiles and individually laminate them, I was able to just run the laminator once and get laminated tiles.

The fact that I used regular copy paper as opposed to card stock or cardboard might've actually helped the process.

Now, the real question is how well will they hold up in the long run. I am sure that over time and play, the plastic will start peel off of the tiles.

In the case of Micropul, that's not such a big deal. Between printing and laminating and cutting, I can probably make a set in about fifteen, twenty minutes and material cost probably comes out around fifteen cents at most. Even if they fall apart after a month of play, that's not too bad.

For more complicated projects, I might want to actually individually laminate every piece.

Despite that, this does make making functional pieces a whole lot easier.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10660/micropul

http://neutralbox.com/micropul/