Joey: “As part of the Roll-and-Write jam we wanted to give not only individual feedback to the designers that took part, but also provide a resource in the form of well, a list of things we noticed and learned during the judging process. Some of these points are indeed things we found were missing as we went along, but other points were also just things we found really good and felt other designers should take it to heart as well. A lot of the things I found were also applicable to my own projects, and these lessons I learned from judging, I just want to share.
Both Robin and I played as many games as humanly possible, which amounted to about 30 to 40 entries each, with overlap, of course. The individual feedback is still being collated as we speak, and should be sent out soon.”
Robin: “First up, let’s just emphasise that there were some excellent games submitted to the jam, with innovative ideas, interesting twists on existing ideas, and mechanics I haven’t seen in roll and write games before. And I was very pleased to see some people doing their very first finished game designs!”
Joey: “So without further ado, let’s jump in:”
Please mention the player count and game length below the title.
Joey: “One of the challenges we had during the judging process is planning our play-testing and working it into our schedules. The player count and game length is a really important part in this. For example, I never split the table at game nights: we all play the same game. In practice that means I would save the two-player games for the rainy Sunday afternoon with my partner, and leave the ones with a higher player count for when I have access to more players. The game length requires more testing to figure out a base-line length, and with my projects it sometimes took a year before I managed to get a consistent game length to put on my rules. With the game length I always feel that if you don’t know, just put ‘??-?? Minutes’ on the rules, both as a placeholder and also to signal that it may still vary, or that you would like to know how long games took. I also found that it is useful to write down a game length even if you don’t know if it will be that long, so you can aim for that. Harvest Bloom, my main project, is aimed at 90-120 minutes, but when games lasted as long as three hours, it was obvious I needed to work to scale that down. Oh, and both player count and game length are the first thing I look at when I pick up a box at my local game store.”
Give the (required) components their separate paragraph or section.
Joey: “Again, this is a planning thing. My pencil case holds a lot of random pens and markers and whatnot, but it has its limits. Knowing beforehand that I need to bring, for example, six coloured markers per player, allows me to plan ahead and make sure I have those around.
Most games in the jam did this very well and gave me a good overview of what I would need. Then there was a section of games that also provided it, but hidden away in the set-up section. As far as I can recall there were no games that I played that required me to reverse engineer the required components from examples or the main rules text. During my research into roll-and-write games, though, I have found print-and-play games in which I only knew the required number of dice when I was instructed to roll ‘five six-sided dice’ about three quarters of the rules in.
A good components section allows players to check if the game is complete, if they can play it for accessibility reasons, and what they will need to collect for print-and-play games.”
Try to make the most of your component limitations.
Joey: “To level the playing field and to make the game jam accessible, we decided to limit the components designers could use in their entries. Many designers tried to push their game to the absolute limit, but we also saw games where the designer left untapped potential on the table. There were games that used only two or three dice, where using the full six would either make the game more exciting and would allow for player interaction through mechanics that are opened up by the amount of available dice. We addressed this as best as possible in the individual feedback, by (hopefully) showing how the game would improve and why.”
We love seeing player interaction in modern roll-and-writes!
Joey: “Okay, this is a long one. I’m sure most of us have played Yahtzee, which is basically the first roll-and-write. Its mechanics are still a cornerstone of the genre, but one thing is really something we can do without: downtime. Downtime is basically the time you are not playing, but waiting for other players. One good way to reduce downtime is to allow or force players to be part of the game even when it is not explicitly ‘their’ turn.
Roll-and-writes use the concept of the ‘Active Player’, who is basically the player who rolls the dice in a given turn. Attached to this concept is the ‘non-Active Player’, or basically all of the other players who are not the Active Player. Even in Yahtzee, there is one Active Player and the other players are non-Active Players. I like to abbreviate this entire concept as Active Player, non-Active Player, or ‘APnAP’. The entire ‘APnAP’ system is important because it allows you to structure your game in terms of who gets to play, who gets to make decisions, how these decisions trickle down, and who sits out. In other words: who gets to, or has to, participate in a given turn? Unsurprisingly, the answer to that question I like to call ‘Participation’.
In roll-and-writes, I feel that Participation is at the core of player interaction, and that we can see four distinct categories.
‘No Participation’ is the first of these and it is basically the Yahtzee-style in which only the active player gets to play. The non-active players sit out, and there is little to no room for (direct) player interaction through the choices of the active player.
Our second type of participation is entirely on the other end of the spectrum with ‘Simultaneous Play’. In these cases there is not really an active player; as the name says: all players play at the same time and really do not interact. Think of games such as Welcome To… or 30 Rails.
‘Optional Participation’ is the third category, and it is when the non-active players get to choose whether to write alongside the active player, like in Qwixx. Usually some mechanics are attached that give the active player more choice.
Finally we get to ‘Mandatory Participation’ and this category is what we have been building up towards all this time. You have an active player who gets to write first, but usually gets to remove dice, or manipulate the dice. Then all of the non-active players have to write using whatever results are left. For example, Noch Mal! Has the active player pick first and remove the dice they picked, leaving fewer options for the other players.
I personally love seeing more mandatory participation in roll-and-writes, but it is something that does not need to be shoehorned in. I feel it allows for tighter games where you are playing against each other, not against the dice.“
There is a time and place for certain old-fashioned mechanics.
Joey: “There is a set of mechanics we don’t like to see in modern board games anymore, these are (among others): roll-and-move (rolling a die and moving that many spaces along a track), player elimination (removing players from the game), ‘take that’ (e.g. directly attacking the opponent or undoing their move through your move), and skipping turns. These all feel very old-fashioned and are often felt to be unfun. If at all possible, avoid these mechanics, but for example in a tight competitive two-player game, ‘take that’ effects are bound to happen. Time and place for everything, but I feel roll-and-writes are not where these mechanics are at their best. Even in games that are designed to be hyper-competitive and nasty, such as Magic: the Gathering, having to skip a turn is just not fun.”
Decide how your game plays (competitive, co-op, etc.) and with how many players, and focus on that.
Joey: “I have been playing a lot of roll-and-writes, also outside of the game jam, and something I notice is that sometimes the designer tacks on additional player counts or different modes of play. This also happens outside of roll-and-writes, and it is something that I am guilty of as well: my main project, Harvest Bloom has special 2-player rules just to get the player count to 2-4 players instead of 3-4. This is why that can be an issue and why I should not do so: every additional special player count and play mode requires testing time that you are taking away from your base game testing time. The end result can be that it feels like there has been a lot of effort going into creating many mediocre options, rather than polishing and honing one really good one.”
Robin: “While it can be annoying for games to have limited player counts, sometimes it’s a healthy trade-off for a good game experience. When I think of games like The Witness, which requires exactly four players, it’s totally worth it! Having said that, I did really appreciate games that included rules for a solo mode.”
A natural end to the game always feels more satisfying.
Joey: “Try to aim for ways to end the game naturally, such as when a (given) scoring method is full or players are unable to write a number of times, instead of simple turn timers. The reason is because turn timers are basically accountancy and require players to keep track of something they can easily forget or miss. There are cool tricks you can pull though. You can hide turn timers in your player sheet though by letting the game end when all spaces are filled, for example.”
Robin: “I often find that turn-trackers are easy to forget, or one player gets stuck with responsibility for them. They also lack dynamism - if there’s something else controlling the game end, then perhaps it also allows for players to speed up the ending if they know they are in the lead, and vice-versa.”
Less set-up time is more playing time.
Joey: “One of the biggest hurdles to getting a game on the table for me is the set-up. Some games like Elder Sign I actually only play digitally because I can’t be bothered to set it up. Because of this, I always try to minimize the work players need to do to get started and reduce set-up, wherever possible, and this is a common piece of feedback that I give to designers. Sometimes these are just small changes: some games had a form of currency that players draw in over the game and cross off when used, for example, but the starting currency had to be drawn in during set-up as it was not printed on the sheet. Small things, but they can add up quite quickly.“
Assume players have not read the rules before set-up and take them by the hand.
Joey: “I prefer to set the game up and go through the motions of a couple of turns to learn the game. Some games like to play a mock round during set-up to generate a starting state. In these cases, sometimes the designers simply instructs you to leaf through the rules to find the bit you need to continue, only to then return for the rest of the set-up. Instead in these cases, I would suggest to take players through the required processes step-by-step as if they know nothing of the game and add this in the set-up in full; this makes sure players don’t need to jump through your rule book before even having set up the game completely.”
Joey: “Let me start off by saying that graphic design was not a category we looked at in the judging of the roll-and-write jam; we were interested in the games, not in a designer’s InDesign skill. In some cases the graphic design helped sell the theme more, but it always came in last in my considerations.”
Icons are your friends, use them, but use them wisely.
Joey: “When using different actions in a game, you can use icons to help remind players what these actions are on the player sheet. This helps players learn faster and makes sure that they need to consult the rule book less often. The icons do need to be clear, otherwise the opposite happens. Having said that, using the right icons is hard. I am currently in the process of replacing as much text as possible with icons in one of my projects, and it is a lot of hit-and-miss, a lot of testing, and a lot of headaches. If you can pull it off, though, it makes your game all that much more intuitive and easy to grasp. I find that Penny Papers Adventures: Skull Island and Castles of Burgundy: the Dice Game make good use of icons, for example.”
Colourblindness can be an issue.
Robin: “When you use colours in your game, try to double-code as much as possible. That means to represent things with more than just colour - a symbol, a pattern, etc. I’m colourblind and came across several games I simply couldn’t play because of simple graphic design choices. When selecting dice colours, brown, red, green, orange, etc., are thematic, but create difficulties for players when used in combination. Expect friction from your players if you choose to use them.”
Double-sided printing is very useful.
Joey: “While judging, I noticed that lot of designers did not use both sides of the rules sheet and missed out big on space to put examples. In most cases this was completely fine and it did not impact the clarity of the rules at all. However, if these designers had used both sides, they could have given the rules a bit more space to breathe, maybe even use a bigger font and some pictures, which would have helped my tired eyes after judging eight games per day. I subtracted no points at all as I found it only a minor cosmetic issue.”
Robin: “I was surprised to see that no games I played used double-sided player sheets - they were explicitly permitted in the rules. I bet they could allow for some neat tricks. For example I’ve been working a roll and write that involved folding and unfolding the player sheets, exposing different sections at different times.”
Robin: “Confusing rules were a recurring problem and probably the biggest source of lost points. It doesn’t matter how good a game is if players can’t figure out how it is played. Common issues included inconsistent lingo, no clear turn structure, and too much assumed knowledge on behalf of the players. Quite a few games omitted things like how to score or put set up at the end of the rules sheet.”
Tell your players what they need to know as early as possible.
Joey: “Sometimes I am reminded of what a lecturer told me about my first essays: ‘Be clear, say things early, don’t leave information for a big reveal, it is not a mystery novel.’ The same is true for rule books. Quite often it helps to reveal the goal of the game early and if possible in its own paragraph or section. Do we win by victory points, do we win by being faster, player elimination even? Knowing this vital information helps players then understand the actions they can take in terms of what these actions do to advance to their goals.”
Leave the game end and scoring for the end.
Joey: “Most rules that I found easy to grasp are ordered as such: set-up, game play, game end and scoring. Quite often the end requires information that you get from the game play section, such as that the game ends when you can’t perform a certain action, or when the turns run out, for example. As such, I would advise to tell your players when the game ends and how scoring is done each in a separate (sub-)paragraph at the end. Otherwise you have the same issue as above, as you may require players to jump through the rules to anything you reference.”
Robin: “I think this one depends on the game. There should be some indication of game-end conditions very early on, but all the details and specifics can certainly wait until you’ve established other rules.”