Week 6: Roll-n-Writes-n-Others
Welcome to Week 6 of No Meeple Left Behind, where the games start rolling and they don’t stop rolling. Ahead of schedule and full of more games, we keep chugging along. A fun perk we get of having this much of a backlog is we can pick and choose which games to review right now and which to save for next week. So, we get to make more intentional groups with similar mechanics or themes than just “things we played this week”. And we did just that here. Let’s get into it.
Bargain Basement Bathysphere
As promised, the Print-n-play game review is finally here. And you can go play it, right now. The original source files for this game are free on BGG. While there is a retail version, I have only played the original myself. And given I printed at my local library and already had a pencil and 5-8 dice, I paid exactly $0.00 for this game. This fact kinda changes the whole color of this review, because while many games like “Final Girl” or “Crokinole” have been chastised for their price point, this one I can inversely praise for it.
In fact, there are a few similarities between this and Final Girl. “Bargain Basement Bathysphere (of Beachside Bay)” (BBB) is also a solo, dice based game. It's actually a sort of Roll-n-Write, games like yahtzee where you roll the dice and mark your sheet of paper. Here though, you are descending down the ocean, spending dice from your pool (usually of 5) to move down towards the depths or back up to the surface. Moving to new levels of pressure or past obstacles without landing on them will cause stress or other nasty effects eventually reducing your dice pool. Said dice pool can only be refreshed by spending oxygen, and spending all of your stress or oxygen will lose you the game. Finally, on the return trip, retreading any previously tread spaces will result in even more stress.
So the real trick here is seeing the writing on the wall and turning around when you still have enough oxygen and stress to make the return trip. Especially because the game never gives you a strict win condition (or at least, I haven’t seen one yet) but rather, points to judge how well you do and progress on overarching meta-mini-games. The result is actually more like a rogue-lite video game in its design than most board games. You do a run, gather some fish, lay some cables, then go on another run. And on each run BBB gives you another little morsel of mechanics, another wrench in your Bathysphere’s engine that you have to consider during your dive.
There is, as Mika pointed out, a shocking number of reversals, however, between this game and Final Girl for me. While both are similar in pitch, they differ in nearly every regard. Final Girl is theme-y at the risk of being unbalanced, while BBB is sharp at the risk of being abstract. Final Girl’s setup is laborious, BBB’s is seconds. Final Girl’s derivative, BBB’s inventive. Final Girl’s value proposition is hard to swallow, and BBB’s hard to beat. Heck, Final Girl tilted me into a negative review, while BBB coaxed me with win after win.
It’s just so clever. Every new wrinkle keeps the game fresh. The core puzzle feels just involved enough to keep me engaged without slowing down the pace. The theming and mechanics found in the meta-progression are incredibly smart. My normal gripe would be with production or cost here, but the game is clearly lovingly produced and provided free of charge.
There are nitpicks to be had, of course. Short games with new mechanics between provide a chunk of down time reading rules instead of playing. I don’t mind rules lawyering but there are many who could get caught up here. Additionally, the abstractness of the tutorial throwing people in without a clear victory condition can absolutely disorient new players. And finally, I have not finished the game, so there is still time for the design to spit in my face. But for now, it has my full attention, and I am so excited for more.
“Chinatown”, like many games I own, comes from a “Shut Up & Sit Down” recommendation, the show that filled the gaping Wil-Wheaton’s-Tabletop-sized consumerist hole in my life. And it has continued to bounce to my table consistently under the promise of being “everything you wanted from the trading part of Monopoly or Catan”. And while the game is not without its hiccups, I feel confident in saying it delivers on this promises, time and time again.
Chinatown is played in 6 rounds, each representing a year of thriving business for 3-5 entrepreneurs sat ‘round the table. During a round players with each acquire property on the map and businesses to build there, but since these draws are mostly random, you're likely to have a disjointed scattershot of both. Thus, players can then trade any of these components with each other, as well as their hard earned cash, to try and create cohesive businesses. Bigger, better, complete businesses made up of adjacent tiles on the map earn you more money per round, with the winner being the one with the most money after all 6 years.
And that's it, everything the game needs to make savvy businessmen out of its players. “Zoo Vadis”, last week, had a lot of parallels drawn between it and Chinatown, because similarly, the game is not the rules but the conversations that the rules inspire. And these conversations are flawlessly energetic, occasionally to the point of being playfully heated. And unlike Zoo Vadis where points are points and favor with other players is the real currency, the different resources in Chinatown are asymmetrically valuable, and anyone could have them. This means you will likely have to make hair-pullingly tense deals with everyone around the table, and frequently, deals where both players have a lot to lose.
There are some speedbumps in the design here. Namely, that the granularity of the currency sometimes makes late game deals impossible. I feel strongly that a 5,000 dollar bill in the game would let there be room to keep negotiating even into the final round. Without it, the game often sings gloriously from years 2 to 4, starts to fizzle out in 5, and often falls completely flat by 6. This is possibly more of a feature than a bug, though, allowing the hard won battles from throughout the game to shine in a sort of post-climactic moment.
It’s still a really good negotiation game, and its theme does a lot of the heavy lifting. A theme that, notably, has been abandoned in the newer editions in favor of a cleaner waterpark aesthetic. I feel torn about this rebrand, because while I can see the value in abandoning the racially charged characters and businesses from a theme coined over 2 and a half decades ago, the subbed in setting is not half as evocative. It places me in a tight spot recommending this game to people, because while I haven’t played it, “Waterfall Park” feels sanitized. But in comparison, Chinatown feels aged. And neither feels like the perfect setting for what these genius mechanisms have to offer.
I’m reviewing the categorical “Railroad Ink” here, but know there are an abundance of varieties to pick through for this game. Out of the 5 colored boxes and 7 expansions, I have played Blue and Green (though only forest) with some of the Electricity and Engineer expansions. It's a staggering franchise with an equally staggering value proposition. Getting the full set puts you back less than $200, the price of one mediocre Kickstarter legacy game. Each of these colors can be found for sub-$20, and are fully playable on their own. And expansions can be picked up for often around only $7.
But what are you getting with these boxes? The game is played in around 7 rounds (depending on expansions). Each round, the set of 4 white dice get rolled and each of the 1-6 (usually) players draw all the shown faces onto their board. These faces feature roads and railroads, turning and intersecting. Connecting up the road and railroad entrances on the edges of your board with these die faces scores you increasingly many points. There are some bonus points for longest road and railroad, as well as utilizing the middle of your board, and penalties for any crazy dead ends. It's about as classic as a Roll-n-Write comes.
But there's some extra spice to be had from these expansions, two of which come baked into every color. Bonus, colorful dice often allow additional scoring conditions from additional challenges. And the more advanced colors (green and yellow) add some extra little board mechanics and shared objectives. All-in-all, the game has a sleek core and a lot of potential flourishes on it.
And it's because of this sleek core that the game can get away with all these expansions. It’s essentially a solo puzzle that you mostly parallel-play with your friends, chewing away at where to place each bend and station. But it’s a damn good one. You start with big aspirations, placing tiles in disparate entrances and across ambitious gaps. And around round 3 or 4, you start to watch either every plan you had crumble around you, or, with a combination of clever planning and lucky rolls, everything click into place. Cheers and groans follow every dice roll, because despite everyone getting identical options, the board quickly diverge into unique strategies and approaches.
This game is, truly, exactly what I want from tile placement and Roll-n-Write, but consequently, inherits the downsides of both genres. The randomized tile placement can be unreasonably punishing. And the solo play of a Roll-n-Write keeps players from interacting much at all, which for many people, is the selling point of board games in the first place. But for me, it slots into my collection like the last piece of a puzzle and keeps making it back to my table as a result.
As a consequence of the success of “Railroad Ink” and Flip-n-Write “Welcome to”, a bit of a Roll-n-Write craze began. Designers saw a winning mechanic and a place that their IP could easily migrate to, and in turn created a flurry of paper pads covered in markable spaces. There have been some real hits in this trend; “Parks: Roll & Hike”, for example, lands for me up with the best of ‘em. But no game was as tremendous an undertaking as trying to boil down “Twilight Imperium 4th Edition” into a 2 hour rolling epic.
But try they did: “Twilight Inscription” is a Roll-n-Write game for 1-8 players who take on the roles of galactic civilizations after the fall of the empire. Players go in rounds simultaneously selecting 1 of 4 sheets to spend the event card’s resources on. Then, the dice are rolled, and the players must spend the rolled resources on the same sheet. Resources beget resources beget resources beget points, as players earn and spend across their 4 sheets. I’m skipping over a lot here, but add some extra event cards featuring wars, votes, and special resources, and you’ve got yourself the intersection of the crunchy space opera, and the breezy Roll-n-Write.
The real question, though, is if these two great tastes taste great together. There’s some obvious friction as soon as you start playing. The Roll-n-Write genre keeps the pace of the game up by often allowing simultaneous play, with the downside being you rarely care what your opponents are doing. The results, here, is that a player with analysis paralysis has the potential to screech a game to a halt. And this player cannot be even blamed, because between wading through the rulebook and considering the math, a turn *should* take a few minutes of silent staring just to formulate.
And I’d like to say the Twilight Inscription makes up for this drag by having a stellar puzzle to mull over but I’m not sure it does. The game turn to turn is interesting and offers a number of different strategies to choose between, but I fear that the impact of the 4 boards on your overall score might not be exactly balanced. I usually shy away from being “the boy who cried ‘broken’” because how can I, especially after just a handful of plays, know the intricacies of strategy *so* well that I can claim to know better than the designers.
Except I have yet to see a player even be competitive without spamming the Industry board for much of the early game, and god forbid you try to spend almost anytime in Warfare. And while this doesn’t make for a broken game, since we all have the same boards to choose from, it does make for a less interesting decision space, and fails to deliver on a core promise of the genre: multiple viable strategies. Now there is a variant of this game where the boards that each player has differ in small ways, so maybe it's just the symmetric board setup that carries this issue. But it is a big drawback for me that the meta is so strict as to be suffocating.
The game's still interesting, and I have fun crunching through it, but it just doesn’t hit either note perfectly. If I want a space opera, I’ll probably stick to “Arcs” or even give the original a try, and if I want a Roll-n-Write, I am at no shortage. It’s a game that I might get more out of if I played another half dozen rounds, but I don’t find myself highly motivated to do so.
So 3 Roll-n-Writes and a little negotiation later, we wrap up another week. I think our lesson this week is that what a game can deliver, and how good it is, is heavily dependent on what is asks of you. And there is a lot a game can ask: price point, player count, setup, rules teach, overhead, focus, and teardown, just to name a few. So when breezy games like BBB or Railroad Ink deliver a lot without asking much, you can enjoy them all the more. Next week we’re focusing on theme-light and abstract games. See y’all then!
