Free Roll & Writes for Quarantine-time (including a custom mod of one by yours truly)

These are crazy times we live in. Almost everyone's life has been flipped, turned upside down by a zombie apocalypse. Seriously, COVID-19 is a lot like those zombie apocalypse movies, only the zombies are invisible, and you don't know right away if or when you've been bitten.

Almost everything about these crazy times has been difficult and terrible, but it's nice to catch a glimpse every once in a while of something good. Every now and again you see people doing something nice to try and help their fellow man through this situation-sometimes it's a big, impactful, important thing, and sometimes it's something trivial, but still nice.

This being a game design blog, I assume that any readers, just like myself, are involved or interested in the world of hobby gaming and maybe game design. For most gamers, anything that happens in that realm probably falls into the category of small-but-nice things rather than big-important things. Nevermind those in the industry who are having a much bigger issue, because for us, games are more than just a pleasant diversion. Me personally? I'm lucky, I still have my engineering job which, for the moment anyway, is still going strong (though that could turn in a hurry if our clients stop building houses!) But I digress...

My intent for this blog post is to point out a couple of those trivial-but-nice things I've seen done recently for gamers. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I was happy to see a few designers and publishers making available some free PDFs of games. Roll & write games are particularly good for this, as you generally just need to printout a scoresheet and scrounge up a few dice. Here are a couple of R&W games that have been made available for free recently that I took the time to print and play, and found to be pretty darn good (in no particular order):

Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade: Carniball

Geoff Englestein has a R&W game coming out soon called Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade, which has 4 different pinball tables, each one a different R&W scoresheet. With just the score sheet and a coupe of tokens, you can play a decent approximation of pinball-minus the physicality, of course.

Publisher WizKids has made one of those tables, Carniball, available as a free print and play so you can try it out.

Tiny Farms

I haven't tried this one, but the competent design team of Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback, now known as Motor City Gameworks, have posted a R&W game featuring a variation on their "Rolldel" mechanism (a combination of dice and rondel). You can download Tiny Farms (with graphic design by DiceHateMe Games) from PnP Arcade or from BGG and give it a shot. How bad can it be?

Rolling Realms

Designer and publisher Jamey Stegmaier (Stonemaier Games) has designed an infinitely scaleable R&W called Rolling Realms, which, if I'm being honest, might be my pick for his best design yet. It features 9 Realms, each based on one of the games that Stonemaier has published. Each round you use 3 of those realms, and roll 2 dice... use those dice in 2 different realms to mark off boxes and collect resources (pumpkins, hearts, and coins) in an effort to score stars.

Jamey has been doing "Teach & Play" sessions on FaceBook live, where he basically plays the game, and you can print out the single sheet PDF and play along with him - you can even play along after the fact with the videos on YouTube. He's iterated through 9 versions at this point, which is basically how game development goes (you play, then you tweak, then you play again).

Jaffee Realms - custom modules for Rolling Realms

This may be burying the lede, but as Jamey mentioned in today's (4/20) Facebook Live video (v9), I enjoyed the concept of Rolling Realms so much that I have been working on my own custom modules based on games that I have designed or developed! If you're interested, you can download the Jaffee Realms PDF and give it a try.

One of Jamey's Stonemaier Champion supporters was kind enough to help me put the PDF together graphically, and in doing so he helped me simplify the realms a lot, since they can't afford to be very complicated (and as per usual, I started out too complicated on most of them). I'm not 100% happy with all of the realms at the moment, so I may tweak them a bit-but I'll be sure to use the same filename so that the link doesn't break :) For those too lazy to click the link, here's what they look like currently (as of v3, 4/20/20):

So take it easy, have some fun when you can, and stay safe!