The recent boom in Yahtzee-style games, known as roll-and-writes (or RnW for short) got me thinking about the genre and its underlying mechanisms. One major design innovation, that distinguishes many games from Yahtzee, is having more than one player make use of a common set of random results. Sometimes this happens in the form of a draft, with players selecting from the available public dice pool, as in Fleet: The Dice Game. In other cases, the rolling player may have some advantaged access to the dice pool. In Qwixx, for example, the rolling player may use dice combinations that the other players may not use.
The subgenre which has captured my interest most is the one in which all players use the same random result, but apply it as they choose to their own board. These games have the unique advantage of being essentially unlimited in the number of players who can play, so long as their are enough sheets and pencils to go around. RnW games that fall into this category include Welcome To… and Railroad Ink.
The random result, by the way, need not be restricted to a number on a die. Welcome To… uses cards with a number on one side, and a card-back for a type of feature on the other side. Using two cards, one face-up and the other face-down, the game indicates which types of features may be placed in which areas on each player’s board. Second Chance is even simpler: players must draw shapes drawn from a deck of polyomino shapes.
Some non-RnW games use this mechanism too. NMBR9, for example, features a card flip that tells players which piece to add to their tableau. Unlike in Second Chance, in NMBR9, Players lay physical pieces onto the table, and, most importantly, stack pieces on top of one another. The need to stack pieces makes the physical format more appropriate and usable than a RnW format. As a result, though, accommodating higher player counts requires more than just a piece of paper.
Credit: Achim Raschka – Wikimedia Commons
Karuba is another great example of a game that could have readily been released as a RnW game. In Karuba each player has an identical set of tiles with paths on them. One player draws a tile at random, and each player finds and plays the matching tile, either adding it to their board or discarding it for movement points.
As a side note, Just One could be seen in a similar light: all the responding players receive the same randomized prompt, but they each seek to create a unique response. In most RnW games, players’ boards naturally diverge from one another as players make different choices and chase different goals. In Just One, the game simply directs players in the bluntest possible way to try and diverge from one another. The mass-market Blank Slate plays with the same concept. Players are provided a prompt word, with a blank either before or after it for them to fill in. All players respond to the same prompt, but contra Just One, in Blank Slate players seek to answer the same as one other player.
What’s remarkable about this design pattern is that it pushes all of the decision-making out of the randomness generator and into the player boards. Consider a game like King of Tokyo, which is not a RnW, though its roots are in Yahtzee, a game sometimes considered (incorrectly, in my opinion) to be the parent of RnW games. In King of Tokyo, the results of the dice offer little player agency. Numbers generate points, hearts generate healing, and claws generate damage. Only energy offers players some choice in how to spend it. The game’s choices are instead centered on which dice results to keep and which to reroll.
That decision is a push-your-luck decision with visceral immediacy, but in the genre of RnW in which all players respond to the same input, that decision is pushed into the player’s board, where players progressively close off avenues of play and shrink down the number of dice outcomes that will pay off for them. At a high level, this is also push-your-luck, but the experiential difference is striking. In games with a Yahtzee-style reroll, there’s a staccato spiking of hope and despair, as each player takes their turn dancing with the dice. But in RnW games there is a kind of creeping doom, a sense of self-immolation in which part of the fun, masochistically, is that moment you realize you’ve drawn yourself into a corner and all your plans have collapsed.
In some ways the rise of the RnW genre is paradoxical. They are light on components and art in an era prone to excess. While the multiplayer solitaire, low-interaction nature of these games seems to fit well with the overall dominant aesthetic of cooperative or non-confrontational play, the dice are another matter. RnWs have a ton more randomness than most modern gamers will tolerate. And even though that randomness is ostensibly pre-decision, input randomness, the march of the die rolls, one after the other, really feels a lot like in output randomness – we mark our papers and roll the dice, hoping for something that will work for us. (You can read more about my thinking on random loops here.)
RnW games are, to me, a hopeful genre, because they demonstrate how even those mechanisms that we are most suspicious of can fit into our gaming diet, and how even concepts that buck the mainstream trend can find a place at our tables.
“RnWs have a ton more randomness than most modern gamers will tolerate”
I would disagree on two fronts. I don’t think modern gamers (by what sense? last 15 years?) are any more randomness-intolerant than previously. In fact a game like Settlers (which is still a chart topper) has more randomness than your average RnW.
An important point I think to consider too, is how the randomness impacts the players. In Settlers, player A could always roll their own numbers, while player B could also roll their numbers, thereby randomness ‘favoring’ player A.
However, in most RnW (Welcome To, Qwixx, etc.) the players all share the rolled dice pool to a degree, so there is much less ‘favoring’ of the current roller.
It really comes down to isolated impact vs shared impact, of the random result. My observation is that players will not complain about randomness as much, when it impacts all players equally.
http://blog.mechanicalmonolithgames.com/
Smuggins, I’m referring to hobby gamers of the last ten years or so, who really have a low tolerance for unmitigated randmoness. Indeed, many of them criticize Catan, and Catan’s reputation among hobby gamers has gone down a ton.
I agree with you that how players experience randomness is critical. Your point about share vs isolated impact is all about player experience though, not math. It’s the sense that everyone could have done what the top scorer did, but didn’t, that make players feel like it’s not too random. But in fact, the actual opportunities for each player score well are more random. Once my board is not like your board, there are some die rolls that will be much better for you than for me, right? And it’s quite possible that rolls that favor me are more likely. But if they don’t get rolled, then I lose and you win.