I didn’t expect Trap Construction Corp to work

Well, it happened again. I went into an Alexander Shen game with low expectations and my first reaction to playing it was "Let's play that again"

While Trap Construction Corp is themed around building traps for a dungeon, it is really filling a grid with Xs and numbers. While many of Alexander Shen's games have a certain level of whimsy, if only in the artwork, this one is as abstract as Tic Tac Toe.

You have an eight by eight grid. Each turn, and there are only eight turns,  roll a six-sided die. On one to five, you get to fill in a pattern with the number in the middle anywhere on the grid. Ones just take up one space while fours and fives let you fill n lines from edge to edge. Sixes force you to block off a three-by three space whose location is determined by rolling two eight-sided dice. New patterns can cover up numbers already on the grid. And those three by three blocks cancel out any numbers or Xs within them. 

At the end of the game, your score is determined by a value determined by the number of numbers on the grid (This is not adding up the numbers but a chart. More numbers, higher value) plus the number of Xs minus the number of empty areas multiplied by the size of the larges empty area. Trap Value + number of Xs - (number of empty areas x size of largest empty area)

Did I mention Trap Construction Corp was abstract?

Yes, the grid is supposed to be a dungeon you have been contracted to fill with traps. The numbers are the traps, the Xs are the area of effect of the traps. and the 3X3 areas are your client's personal quarters. But does it remotely feel like that? No. Honestly, a theme about urban development would make more sense, although it wouldn't make the game any more thematic.

I have played a lot of abstract strategy games and a lot of Roll and Writes over the years. And you generally get a sense of when a game is going to be functional with no mechanical issues but with no engagement. The equivalent of balancing your checkbook but without the positive outcome of accomplishing something, even if its just your own entertainment. And I really assumed that Trap Construction Corp would be like that.

However, what got me is the empty spaces and trying to make them as small as possible. The actual hook of the game is cutting up the grid. Even a rolling a one and only being able to fill in one space can be crucial it its the right space. And since you have the freedom to place a trap on any open space, you have a lot of actual choices. And the sixes with their 3x3 blocks keep the tension up. 

Yeah, somehow rolling eights ones would lead to a completely broken play. However, that would clearly be an extreme outlier. And the game is eight turns long. That makes a potential unbalanced game like that more forgivable.

Alexander Shen's focus seems to be making tiny games and puzzles that take five minutes or less to play. That's not something everyone needs or wants. However, be it for coffee breaks or brain fog breaks, I have found that I am indeed in the demographic that plays those kind of games. And Shen has proven to have a real gift for creating them. it might seem like a super easy thing to make but I have seen enough bad examples that I have come to appreciate Shen.

That said, Shen has had misses, games and puzzles that didn't interest me or were even broken. I really expected Trap Construction Corp to be a game i checked off the list and forgot. Instead, it looks like it's headed for my clipboard of coffee break Roll and Writes.

Sketchy Ski Lifts is about making lazy skiers happy

It has been many years since I last played On the Underground (although I wouldn't mind playing it again) but the element that has stuck with me is the lazy passenger mechanic. The idea of a passenger who will always take the route that will involve the least walking. And really, who can blame them?

Sketchy Ski Lifts is a free PnP R&W that is pretty much built around that idea. I don't know if On the Underground was any kind of inspiration, but it takes the most memorable element of that game and focuses on only that. And, just in case you don't read any further, it works pretty well.

There are multiple maps of increasing difficulties. Each one has a grid of three pairs of destinations and clumps of trees, along with a fairly simple tech tree/bonus track. Your goal is the create the most efficient routes between each of the paired destinations and you will be scoring the routes twice over the course of the game. 

The game is played on 8 x 10 grid, which does give it the benefit of being bigger than the 6 x 6 grid which sometimes feels like the standard for PnP. Each turn, an eight-sided die and a ten-sided die get rolled. One for the columns and one for the rows. Actions include setting up a ski lift station, adding a ski lift pole and knocking down a tree so that lines can pass through that square. You can also spend a die to make a check mark on that tech tree/bonus track I mentioned.

I quite like a tech tree and I admit that I might be pushing a little heavily to make Sketchy Ski Lift's bonus track count as one. Squares on it can give you a bonus action on any square in the grid or let you get an upgrade, like taking out whole groups of trees in a go or adjusting the die when you place a ski life pole. None of the upgrades have any prerequisites so the tracks in Settlers of the Stone Age have a better claim to be real tech tree. Still, getting those extra little abilities makes a real difference in your play.

You will notice that actually running ski lift lines doesn't actually show up on that list of actions. That's because you draw those in at the halfway point and the end of the game. You create the infrastructure for the lines during the actual turns and then you get to turn them loose twice in the game. With each ski lift route counting as one and each empty square that your poor ski customers have to hoof as one, you figure out how many points it costs to travel between each paired destination. And you are going for the lowest score possible.

As I've already said, Sketchy Ski Lifts clicks for me nicely. While it uses ideas I have seen before, they aren't ones I've seen too often. More than that, it pairs them with a theme that makes them make sense. There is an intuitive quality to the game. You get enough turns to get some things done but not enough to get everything done. Your decisions will matter.

I think that Sketchy Ski Lifts gives you an interesting experience for a very low cost. (As someone who has lived through every edition of Dungeons and Dragons, I assume everyone has d8s and d10s lying around) However, as I explore the different maps, it may turn out to be a hidden gem. 

Being weird doesn’t mean good gameplay but does mean a closer look

Farmers Finances was a game that I discovered shortly after I started seriously looking at Print and Play. It placed first in the 2016 9-Card Design Contest, which was why I found it so easily. I played it occasionally for a couple years and then set it aside.

I will say that, when I was doing a heavy possession purge while preparing for a cross country move, Farmers Finance survived.

It’s a commodity trading game that consists of nine cards. Plus one die and a few tokens. I have seen a lot of minimalistic games over the last several years and Farmers Finances is still impressively minimalist.

In fact, three of the cards are used to track money and the market. There are only actual six cards that you are doing stuff with. Four wheat and two cows. You spend the entire game buying and selling these cards over and over.

The last time I really looked at Farmers Finances, I couldn’t decide what I thought of it. I felt like it was a unique, downright fascinating design. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure the actual gameplay was that strong.

Obviously, you want to buy low and sell high. And you can increase the value of your wheat by turning it into bread. The decisions are pretty obvious and the random market changes have a big effect on how things go.

Having gone back to it after a number of years, I feel like the pros and cons have actually just gone more extreme. On the one hand, I found the choices even more limited. On the other hand, I have played dozens of Print and Play games and I have still played nothing like it.

Ultimately, Farmers Finances is like a dancing bear. It isn’t that it’s a good dancer. It’s just amazing that it dances at all.

And here’s the thing. The game is nine cards. That’s not the minimum amount of construction for a Print and Play but it’s still very low. It’s such an unusual experience that I think it’s worth making and playing.

Take It Easy somehow became a genre

Take It Easy casts a shockingly big shadow. For such an honestly light and quick little game, its core mechanic of Bingo with strategy has been used in what has to be hundreds of designs at this point. And while many of those designs haven't made it to the formal publication stage (I look at a lot of design contests and free PnP files and other prototypes), there is no denying its influence.

While the term multiplayer solitaire gets used as a pejorative for games that have minimal or only indirect interaction, Take It Easy is an example of a true multiplayer solitaire. Nothing anyone else is doing has any effect on you. Everyone has their own board and there is no difference between a solitaire game and an auditorium where the moves are being shouted out to everyone over a loudspeaker. More than that, play is simultaneous, which makes playing with a big group actually viable.

There have a been a couple of waves of Bingo With Strategy games, with the first ones being from creators who clearly grew up with Take It Easy. Reiner Knizia's Take It Higher is a clear example of that. I think Karuba is a particularly creative use of the core mechanic. And the increase in Roll and Writes led to dice-based uses of the mechanic because that seriously cuts back on the amount of components. However, 2020 with the need for games that you could play while social distancing made the mechanic explode.

And, let's be honest. Multiplayer solitaires can be played as flat out solitaires without changing anything. Which is honestly what drew me to them. I could have the actual experience of playing the game without feeling like I was playing a lesser version. And, again, what with the explosion of interest in Bingo With Strategy games, I am sure I am not alone.

And some of these games can be surprisingly complex, using dice pools and economic systems. I am pretty sure there are some war games that use Bingo With Strategy as a core mechanic, even if that's not where my interests really lie. Creators have done a lot with the idea and I'm sure some of them haven't even heard of Take It Easy. Which makes me ask, how does Take it Easy, which just consists of trying to make colored lines cross a hexagon, hold up?

The answer is surprisingly well.

Personally, in addition to being a game I routinely go back to for solitaire play, Take It Easy is one of the most successful games I've found to introduce to non-gamers and I've even had it requested. In fact, while when I first tried to get a copy, it was hard to find, it seems to have been in print and easy to find for many years.

And I think the key to what makes Take It Easy work and what has always made it work is not that it is simple (And to be fair, it is very simple) It is that Take It Easy is unforgiving. Once a line is broken, there is no mitigating factors. That line is done. Since the tiles are a known factor, there is room to make educated guesses. However, its still always a gamble. The 'wrong' tile can bring your plans down like a house of cards in a hurricane. That means that there is tension and getting a good score is actually meaningful.

Take It Easy took a while to become influential. From what I can tell, literally a generation. Some ideas take time to catch on. However, it’s always been a good game.

Zombie apocalypses make me care about Sonic

 I have never actually had much interest in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Most of my knowledge of platforming games comes from my wife and son and they prefer Mario. However, when I saw that Humble Bundle had a Sonic comic book bundle, I was interested enough to pick it up.

You see, one thing that I do know is that Sonic the Hedgehog had the longest running comic book based on a video game. Archie Comics ran their title for twenty-four years. And I had heard about this because the series developed both a big fan base and a lot of legal issues. Quite frankly, I suspect that reading about all the behind-the-scenes events might be more entertaining for me than the actual comic book.

And here's the kicker. The bundle (and I knew this going in) is a completely different series produced by IDW. However, I felt it would be still worth my while because I knew the older series would influence the newer one (I believe it even has some of the same creative staff) and IDW has a pretty good track record with IPs.

One thing that was very clear, albeit not remotely surprising, is that Sonic has a lot more personality than Mario lol I think that was Sonic's selling point from the get-go, that he had more attitude than Mario. My family loves Mario games. As the RPGer, I played though Super Mario RPG partially for my family’s entertainment (I was entertained too) and it was good fun. However, Mario is clearly what Scott McCloud referred to in Understanding Comics as a mask, a blank slate we can project ourselves onto. (Works even better as a concept in video games than comic books) Having character works against the purpose of Mario.

Also, as someone who only knew about Sonic and Tails and Knuckles and Shadow (and some of them only thanks to movie trailers), I had no idea how ridiculously big the Sonic cast was lol

The bundle's graphic novels largely consist of the first two story arcs for IDW's version of the comic book. And, boy, are they the complete opposite end of the spectrum.

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The first arc was about Sonic and his friends thwarting a big bad who was trying to gather the setting's McGuffins, the chaos emeralds so thru can  conquer the world. It was boilerplate action storyline and I would not be surprised if it was an adaptation of a video game and I just didn't know it. Amusing but forgettable.

The second, longer story arc was the Metal Virus Saga, a zombie apocalypse. Now, instead of dying, the cute critters of Sonic's world were getting coated with metal. Apart from that, pure zombie apocalypse. For an all ages comic book, it was surprisingly dark and emotionally mature about the crisis.

Pretty much right off the bat, Sonic gets infected. He can fight it off with his hyper metabolism but it is a gradually losing battle. Issue after issue of Sonic trying to save the world while he can't save himself. Might not be deep but it definitely drives tension and emotional weight.

The MVP for the arc goes to Cream, a bunny rabbit who turns out to actually be from the games and who feels like a replacement for Tails when they wanted to age him up.  (Total guess on my part)  While introduced as a beacon of optimism, she has to watch her family succumb to the plague as she struggles to help the survivors. Good job,IDW, getting me emotionally invested in a character.

The single scene that stayed with me was a nameless infected civilian sneaking into the resistance shelter because they didn't want to be alone when they, for all intents and purposes, died. And, yes, it went horribly wrong. It was a surprsingly emotional scene for an all ages work.

I haven’t become a Sonic fan from this experience. However, I was surprised at how good the Metal Virus Saga was. 

Interesting ideas don’t always lead to satisfying Sudoku

I let Dicember be an excuse to go through my Roll and Write files and look for odds and ends. That’s how I ended up playing Dicedoku.

Yeah, it’s a Sudoku as a dice game. It’s not even the first time I’ve seen that (we will get back to that)

Like other games like it, it uses two by three boxes to form the collection of grids because you are only using six numbers. And it’s a two X three grid of those boxes so it’s a six by six larger grid.

And, yeah, if that doesn’t make sense, it will with one glance at the board.  

Here’s the clever bit. Each turn, five dice get rolled. You use one of them to select a Tetris shape. Then, you make that shape with the other four numbers and put that number-shape into the grid.

I’ve seen similar mechanics. Mosaix, which is from 2009, has a similar idea. But I can’t think of seeing this exact mechanic before. And I do think it is interesting. 

Unfortunately, I found the actual game to be mildly annoying and I kept wishing the mechanic had been put to a more interesting use. It wasn’t the worst game I learned for Dicember 2024 but I can’t say I want to play it more.

A year or so ago, I learned Sudoku Rush, which is speed sudoku. The idea isn’t as clever but the execution is more fun. The fact that I can say that isn’t good for Diceduko.

Diceduko has an interesting core mechanic but applying to Sudoku just makes me want to do regular Sudoku puzzles.

Does Orchard:Recipes do enough?

 Orchard was a game that revised my ideas about what you could do with nine cards. While I had played multiple tile-laying games that had only eighteen cards, I felt nine cards wouldn’t leave enough decisions. But Orchard did it.

And Grove took that formula and elevated it. And a major way that it did it was to add Sprawlopolis-style goals with scoring targets. And while I did still play Orchard, I liked Grove more.

Orchard:Recipes is an expansion that adds those goals to Orchard.

Truth to tell, the biggest effect Orchard:Recipes had me was appreciate other elements of Grove (and later Forage when I learned that game) Mind you, I do like having a clear win-lose condition in solitaire games because it creates a clear goal beyond ‘beat your own score’ or ‘just do this activity’ So Orchard:Recipes does improve the game for me.

Grove has glades, which are effectively blank squares. They add a lot of flexibility to your ability to place tiles. They make the game sort of easier but also more interesting.

In comparison, Orchard is a lot less forgiving. Every square has a type of tree and that makes placement a lot more restrictive. Having a way to get bonus points and a point goal doesn’t change that.

I am glad I made and tried Orchard:Recipes. However, I still prefer Grove (and Forage)