It has been over six months since I've written a post purely about mechanics. (We're not counting the recent theming actions/structures/strategies series, because in my mind those posts are about theme.) This is a mechanics roundup post, my second, that takes a deep look at the mechanisms that that can crop up in certain areas of game design. This post is all about roll & writes.
I'm not an expert in the roll & write genre; I simply haven't played that many. But I find their ever-branching development to be fascinating. So, while this post will be far from comprehensive, I want to break down some of the mechanisms that crop up in the roll & write genre.
Sometimes called random & write, the umbrella genre breaks into two halves: dice (true roll & writes) and cards (flip & writes or draw & writes or draw & draws). The genre is largely defined by the random or semi-random accrual of resources and logging those resources on a personal player sheet (or more rarely a communal board). I'm using the word resources in the broadest possible sense to include roads and buildings and geographical features (or merely numbers that must be logged in a certain order) as well as items we more traditionally think of as resources. In theory, any sort of randomizer could be substituted for dice or cards. Sonora is a flick & write, using dexterity as a semi-randomizer. Acquiring resources in a way that is not at all random, however, would likely fall beyond the boundaries of this genre. For instance, I have a game that involves flipping cards to obtain resources, but the cards are laid out in a grid and the players always know what is on the reverse side of each card. I joke that the game is a flip & write, but the main mechanisms are action drafting and blocking. On the other side of the coin, games that don't involve marking on a board or sheet also tend to not be included in the genre, even if they have all the other hallmarks of a roll & write. Era: Medieval Age claims to be a roll & build, because the game takes elements previously seen in roll & writes but eschews drawing in favor of placing plastic buildings on a board.
Now that we know the minimum requirements for a game to be a random & write, let's take a closer look at common mechanisms found in the genre. There is a great variance of mechanisms within random acquisition beyond whether the game uses dice or cards. Here are some of the more prominent ones—
Bingo: Every player must allocate 100% of the resources revealed. The only choice presented is how players choose to allocate the resources. This mechanism is used with both dice and cards, sometimes with both at once. Players are almost always allocating resources simultaneously to their personal boards. (Let's Make a Bus Route subverts this by having the revealed resource card translate into different actions for each player which are then carried out on a common board.)
Simultaneous pooled resource selection: This is a variant of bingo. Every player must choose a subset of the resources revealed. There may be restrictions on how resources are chosen. Play is still simultaneous and resources do not diminish. This adds increased variance between player boards. Again, this mechanism uses dice, cards, or both. I haven't seen this done with a shared board, but it seems more possible than simple bingo. Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw showcases how using this mechanism with cards can add strategic tension by having two different decks that get added to the pool each round.
Drafting: Players select a subset of resources from a pool and those resources are no longer available to other players. Acquisition is therefore turn based. Allocation may also be turn based, especially if there is a shared board. First player may rotate from round to round to make drafting more fair. This mechanism could use cards or dice but is unlikely to have both. Cards are more likely to be drafted from a pool rather than pick-and-pass, largely because simple, fast acquisition is a hallmark of the genre. (Combos in R&Ws usually come from how resources are allocated, not how they are acquired.) Let's Make a Bus Route: The Dice Game sits somewhere between drafting and pooled resource selection; the first player chooses three dice and the second player chooses one.
Yahtzee: On their turn, the active player rolls a pool of dice up to three times, selecting some dice to save after each roll. Play is turn based; resources are not shared. This mechanism offers the most choice per turn but also the most instances of randomness. As far as I know, there is not a game that attempts a Yahtzee mechanism with cards or on a shared board. If you're looking on BGG for this mechanism, it is listed as 're-rolling & locking.'
Resource allocation mechanisms fall broadly into two categories: set collection and spatial placement—
Set collection almost always requires a personal board to mark off resources that have been collected. Completed sets usually offer bonus points and/or single special abilities that allow players to trigger combos. Set collection mechanisms encourage players to push their luck by penalizing collecting too much of a resource. Players are more likely to mark off resources by ticking a box than draw them as icons. The trait that won me over for R&Ws is that you are not limited to the number of resource chits that can fit in a box. You can put thirty different resources on a single sheet and still have a small, affordable game. Generally, large numbers of resources are going to fall into set collection and not have a spatial element.
Spatial placement typically uses a grid that may have preprinted features and/or coordinates that restrict placement. Spatial placement mechanisms focus on adjacency and connection. They create tension by allowing players to paint themselves into a corner. Players are more likely to draw resources than mark them off, although grids of preprinted resources combine elements of set collection and spatial placement. Spatial placement mechanisms really took off with the advent of map-building games that combine route-building or city-building with terrain-building. These games produce visual artifacts as the result of play that can be quite aesthetic, especially compared to the spreadsheet look of most R&Ws.
Many spatial placement games have set collection aspects to them such as Harvest Dice, which has players drawing vegetables in a garden plot. In Harvest Dice, adjacency restricts where you can plant but scoring is determined by sets of vegetables and their market value. Games can also combine both set collection and spatial placement as separate ideas in the same game. In Let's Make a Bus Route, players use spatial placement to build routes on a shared board. The routes collect secondary resources (riders) that are marked off on a personal player board. Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade combines set collection and spatial placement by making the sets only reachable thru various spatial rules (mostly involving implied gravity). Layering resource allocation mechanisms can provide additional tension and depth of play at the cost of making the game more complex.
Both simultaneous resource selection/acquisition and simultaneous allocation are hallmarks of R&Ws. This keeps the games feeling fast and breezy even when players are making tense decisions because there is virtually no downtime between turns. Personal player boards facilitate simultaneous actions but prevent most player interaction. R&Ws are efficiency puzzles; most have a set number of rounds or end when a player has filled a certain portion of their board. Player interaction may not be particularly desirable, as players are likely to be focused on their own puzzle.
None of this is prescriptive, however. As the genre continues to iterate and expand, some games (like Era: Medieval Age) will fall outside the bounds of what is considered a R&W. Other games, like Sonora, are considered within the genre, even as they push the limits of what it means to be a random & write. Genres work best as ways of descriptively grouping things, and pushing boundaries is often how new genres are created. Since this genre has such a simple format, it provides a lot of opportunity for creative mechanisms, because almost anything goes. Is there luck? Do you draw or write? If yes, you're good to go.
ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.
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