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.

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.

16 lueurs d’hiver, winter expands on fall

Let’s start off with thanking Accessijeux for letting a game published for their charity out into the wild and Benjamin Cronshaw for translating the rules into English.

16 lueurs d’hiver or 16 Winter Lights is a multi-player solitaire Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write that was originally published to raise money for Accessijeux. It’s the second in a series of season themes games, in this case, winter.

While 61 Autumn Leaves uses a format of one die to pick a mini game and one die to use in the chosen mini game with the third die going to the turn track, 16 Winter Lights mixes it up. 

There are five mini games. Each turn, you get to pick one of the mini games and assign two of the dice to it. And, instead of a turn track, you check off a light from numbers one through five, which six being wild.

Each of the turn marker numbers have four lights. If you fill in all four, you get some kind of special power. After someone completely fills in four of the five, the game ends. So the game will last sixteen to nineteen turns.

Make no mistake, 16 Lights is on the simple side of the Roll and Write spectrum.That said, it does have a bump in complexity from 61 Leaves and it offers a lot of good choices. And I really like how you unlock different special powers. I feel like there isn’t one single obvious choice or path to victory. 

The mini games in 16 Lights of include more than just make sets of numbers. The restriction of needing to use two dice makes the choices more nuanced. I could even see the domino mini game being expanded into a stand alone game. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still really like 61 Leaves. I just think  there’s less game in it compared to 16 Lights. 61 Leaves is _very_  accessible but I find 16 Lights more engaging.

16 Lights is not just 61 Leaves with different pictures. It is a meaningfully different game that also happens to be a pretty good game.

Trains, dice snd contests

 I’ve been meaning to try out Rolling Boxcars from the 13th Roll and Write Design Contest since, well, the contest from 2022.

It’s honestly amazing how many Roll and Write design contests there were as a reaction to the COVID lockdown, when there as a real need for home printed games. It produced a lot of interesting designs. 

And train themes have long been an interesting one for me. While Ticket to Ride was a big part of my introduction to board games, it was really Mayfair Games presence at GenCon that did the trick.

The late Mayfair had a ribbon event where you played games to earn ribbons. And train games were a major part of their line, since the company was originally formed to publish Empire Builder. (But, let’s be honest, getting the US license for Catan was their biggest move)

I’m rambling because, after trying Rolling Boxcars, I don’t have much to say about it. I didn’t get any sense of theme or innovation from it. Mechanically, nothing wrong. However, I found the game ultimately  forgettable. And I’m pretty generous for finding the bright spots in games.

In fact, Rolling Boxcars made me go back to Fast Train to Miyajima, which was from the fourth R&W design contest from 2020. It is also a simple dice game about loading  trains.

In addition to the fact that I can actually feel the theme, I like it’s mechanic of having to combine primary colored dice in order to load a secondary color train. Simple but also cute and memorable. I still hold that, with a little bit of polish, it could be professionally published and find an audience.

Neither game has an actual entry on BGG. And, while I found Rolling Boxcars didn’t click for me, Fast Train to Miyajima is a very hidden gem. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2958172/wip-boxcars-13th-roll-and-write-contest-contest-re

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2442024/wip-fast-train-to-miyajima-r-and-w-contest-compone

A one die Yahtzee can work

 After I wrote a less than glowing commentary about Boat, a three-dice Yahtzee variant, BGG user d x@UanarchyK

asked me to check on their game Raft, a ONE die Yahtzee variant.

The bad news for d x@UanarchyK is that I thought Raft was simply okay. The good news is that I consider it to be a _much_ better game than Boat. 

In Raft, you are filling out six different scoring categories. (1&6s, 2&5s, 3&4s, full house, straight and five of a kind) However, you are not filling it out one category at a time. Instead, you are filling out a five by six grid.

And here’s what made me laminate a copy of the game. Each roll must be placed in the same row or column as the last roll. 

That creates a lot more decisions than Boat gave me while the restrictions make those decisions cruel. I feel like I have enough control to make failure have meaning.

In the minis column: Raft is abstract and dry. Rolling one die thirty times could get tedious, although it wasn’t as bad as I feared. And rolling one die as opposed to even two increases the random factor. (Can’t Stop wouldn’t be a good game if was numbered one to six with you rolling two dice. Honest, that sentence does make sense)

In the positive column: It’s currently free and low ink so the opportunity cost is next to nothing. It could work as a simultaneous multiplayer Solitaire like Take It Easy with any number of players. It’s easy to teach with actually meaningful decisions.

One of the first Roll and Write game I played that only used one die was Not Another One, which soured me to the idea. It took games like Waypoints to make me reassess the idea. And Raft is another good example of one die working.

Boat was a copy of Yahtzee only less. Raft uses Yahtzee ideas but is its own thing. 

Is there any reward to simplifying Yahtzee?

 It has become a definite part of my gaming hobby to hunt down odd little truffles. Short games that you can easily knock together yourself. The world of PnP micro games is a surprisingly engaging and diverse one.

But when I came across Boat, I honestly had to ask myself ‘Is this really necessary?’ At the same time, Boat was too convenient for me not to try.

It’s Yahtzee with three dice. 

Boat has two fewer categories and it has a couple different ones. You can’t have a full house with only three dice after all. But it’s still two rerolls and mark a scoring line every time.

Yahtzee is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. I like fidgeting on my phone by playing it solitaire. And I do think it can be a good core mechanic for better, more complicated games. However, it’s not a game I’d played with physical dice. If I’m getting out dice, I’m going to play a better game. And I think it’s a appalling multiplayer game. I honestly believe games that are literally multiplayer solitaires should have simultaneous play.

The selling point of Boats is that is simplifies Yahtzee by having two less dice and two less turns. I will argue that, when you scale down a game, you should either meaningfully reduce its footprint or playing time (or ideally both) and I don’t think Boat does either. Two fewer dice is not going to be the deciding factor on picking Boat over Yahtzee.

(Playing devil’s advocate, I do appreciate Euphrates & Tigris: Contest of Kings, which has a larger footprint on the table than Tigris & Euphrates. However, its storage footprint is minuscule which is how it survives purge after purge in my collection)

I also think that Boats is weaker than Yahtzee which isn’t the strongest game in the first place. Playing Yahtzee as a fidget exercise, my personal victory condition is to get the bonus. If I did the math right, it’s statistically harder to get the bonus in Boats. (Admittedly, I think the odds are less then 10% different but it’s still harder)

In fact, the odds of getting a pair in the first roll and trying to build something off of it is much higher in Yahtzee. The ability to plan and play with the odds, which is basically Yahtzee’s biggest virtue, isn’t there in Boat.

For me, a game that filled the role of ‘Yahtzee but simpler’ was Cinq-O. It’s not a Yahtzee as Boat but it is meaningfully simpler and more dynamic while still being fun. I’m sure there are a lot of little dice games that fit that same description.

I do appreciate the mechanical choices that were made to modify Yahtzee to three dice. I do find it an interesting as an intellectual experiment. However, that doesn’t make Boat a game I want to play.

Flip Freighters is exactly what it says it is, no less and no more

 I’ve been looking at Flip Freighters really since it came out. More than anything else, having to put together a deck from two decks of traditional playing cards got it sidelined compared to games that just required grabbing dice.

However, Flip Freighters promised me something that I’ve been wanting, a Roll and Write Pick Up and Deliver experience. And, yes, Flip and Write is close enough.

(And I have played some games that featured the mechanic. Voyages, Recycling Route and Gryphon Delivery Service are the ones that immediately come to mind. However, none of them quite hit the mark for me as a Pick Up and Deliver game, a miniature Empire Builder on paper. I would play them all again, though, particularly Voyages. Voyages is awesome)

During one of my periodic binges of BGA, I noticed that Flip Freighters was in their library. That took away the biggest hurdle that I had, being too lazy to put the deck together.

Honestly, Flip Freighters turned out to be pretty much what I thought it would be. And it does give me the Pick Up and Delivery experience that I thought it would. But, in some ways, it might be too much on the nose. 

Take two decks of cards and make a deck out of only aces through sixes, plus all the jokers. Shuffle and make three decks of fifteen and set the rest aside. Everyone get a play sheet with nine trucks and a distance track for each truck.

The game takes place over three five-day work weeks. Each stack of fifteen is one week and you reveal three cards each turn to represent a day.

You can use cards to either load a truck or move a truck. The trucks hold four or six cards with different rank or suit requirements. All that matters for moving is the rank, moving that many spaces on the truck’s track. You can move a truck that isn’t fully loaded but you can’t add anything to it once it’s moving. And the more stuff on a truck, the more points it’s worth when you make the delivery.

You score your finished deliveries at the end of each week. So, if you make a delivery by the end of week one, you’ll score it again on weeks two and three. There are also overtime boxes that you can use to modify cards but are worth points if you don’t use them.

At the end of three weeks, high score wins.

Flip Freighters is a game that you can figure out most of the game play by looking at the play sheet. It may be the most bare bones, basic, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Pick Up and Deliver I’ve seen. 

Which is a con and a pro. 

Against it, there is nothing surprising going on here. There isn’t any clever twists or novel mechanics. The theme is just what it says on the tin. Flip Freighters is so straightforward that it’s kind of dry.

I can’t help but think that if Flip Freighters had come out twenty years ago, when Qwirkle was making the industry reevaluate Roll and Writes as a medium, it would have been revolutionary. But Roll and Writes and Flip and Writes have seen a lot of development.

On the other hand, Flip Freighters does deliver exactly what it says that it does. It gives you a distilled Pick Up and Delivery experience. If that’s what you want, you’ll get it from Flip Freighters. It’s also very accessible, both from a mechanical standpoint and from the Cheapass philosophy of using cards people already own. (James Ernst would have given it a wackier backstory, though)

Ultimately, from a mechanical standpoint, Flip Freighters doesn’t do anything special. If you have a closet full of train games, it will do absolutely nothing for you. On the other hand, from a budget gamer standpoint, it’s very solid. From the standpoint of doing what it says it will, Flip Freighters does a great job.