Our 5(6?) Favourite New Roll'n'Write Games

roll [Music] and right i'll wait while you try and think of two more exciting verbs but not for too long because it can't be done today the world is in a resurgence of role and right games in which players use some kind of a random generator in the center of the table whether that's cards or dice to make permanent progress on their own little sheet the role and right game you've most likely heard of is yahtzee but to see everything this genre can be i would point you towards our reviews of the terrific welcome 2 or the still more terrific railroad inc in this video myself and tom and matt are going to be showing you no less than five of our favorite newish role and rights that's right five reviews in one video and we're going to open with open haagen roll and right because two things i've not been able to do since 2020 began are coping or hugging provided to us by publishers queen games this is a pocket-sized version of a full-size board game called copenhagen in which players had to use tiles to slowly build characterful buildings in the danish city of copenhagen i really like the full-sized game of copenhagen but the rolling right is super similar super slim and super s is affordably priced and i think it's great on your pie that's stained in the review on your turn you roll these lovely dice which let you pick one of these shapes to draw with white results being wild and here you're playing something like satan's tetris starting from the bottom and working your way up you're getting points for filling rows big points for filling columns but also each shape you draw must contain one x and you're gonna get double points for each of your rows and columns that has no x's in it it's very much in vogue at the minute for board game designers to have players use shapes to try and fill a grid this is one of the better ones and it's also one of the more rewarding ones uh with like with you feeling instantly like you're getting somewhere but also like you're screwing up from the very first shape you draw anyway that's just when it's your turn when it's not your turn you get to pick one of the colors that the main player isn't using to make a notch in one of these sort of power up bars every plus you hit lets you enlarge the building blocks you're drawing if you choose to draw that color on your tongue but every star you hit unlocks a special power like getting to re-roll dice or draw a shape without an x in it or draw a shape that somebody has already used oh yes these shapes are limited get your copens skates on skates on haagen this is still a very breezy relaxing game it's a particularly easy game to finish and say let's just let's just play again let's play again let's play again and yet it is still tricky it's still taxing my final thoughts on copenhagen i think they should have called it a roll and write game right with the w cross because this is just a game that gets everything right the sheets look nice the box is a nice size the dice these big wooden dice are absolutely fantastic and also by when you look at your sheet at the end of a game you're going to either love or hate all of the decisions you've made and that for me is what defines this genre the only thing really that separates royal rights from other games is you're able to look down at any point and see every decision you've made in the game and for a good roll and write for me that has to be an interesting feeling i have to look at this and go oh that's great i love myself in deciding that what was i thinking there and at the end of a game of copenhagen your sheet is going to be clammy with compromises and that conversation you're having with your past self and occasionally your friends those lucky devils is gonna be that much more interesting for it so that's the first game down next up is tom i think i hope he doesn't have any spicy controversial takes for you kids i've got a spicy controversial take for you kids and that's the i think rolling rights aren't that good when you play them as a group and i prefer them solo is that sad matt and queens would say yes but i think that it's fine and perfectly reasonable because if i want to play a game alone that doesn't involve staring at a screen after a long terrible day of editing nonsense then these are right here for me and i like them in fact i think that roll and write games are so specific to this mode of play that every single one of them should come with a cool tray to play him in bed with and to that end you can now buy an official shut up and sit down roll in bed tray for just 73.98 you can actually play all kinds of games with them look at this beautiful shot of el dorado it's a gorgeous thing that you can have in your home and with that scintillating preface let's move on to super skill pinball 4k the perfect roll and right in this list if you're lonely like me have you ever wanted to play pinball but in the comfort of your own home on four separate tables inside a tiny little box in a strategic board game roll and right format if you answered yes then welcome to the club let me tell you this super skill pinball 4k has given me a mere pinball schlub a vocabulary with which to describe pinball that few other games can offer in fact this game makes you say things like back glass with worrying frequency that is to say the super skill pinball 4k will make you feel like pinball here's how it works pull a laminated sheet a pen two dice and a couple of shiny pinballs from the box and get yourself comfortable place the pinball at the top of the sheet and roll roll until your hands ache and your eyes bleed because you're going to beat your high score and you're going to beat it tonight here's the thing the mechanics of super skill pinball 4k are much simpler than its eyesore of a title might suggest roll both dice choose one of the numbers cross off a box of that value from the layer you are currently on or lower if that causes you to fill in a whole thing you'll score that area and erase it in most cases once your options get slimmer the ball might hit the bottom layer betwixt the flippers filling in one of those boxes will ping your ball back to the top of the board ready to score and fill again and again until you get to the bottom of the board with no boxes that match your dice what happens then you'll lose that ball if that happens three times you're out and your scoreboard will be updated with your new score was it higher than last time you better hope so or you'll be writing garbage numbers in those columns that make your super high scores look like dog dirt flukes let me give you a whistle stop tour of all the mechanics that contained inside this beautiful box as if jeff engelstein was over generous santa claus cramming presents into stockings after being unceremoniously fired for skill shots are often rewards for filling in a certain part of a table and allow you to instantly change your dice to that number at any given moment nudging is a three usability that lets you change a number but then if the difference between the two dice in your next roll is smaller than that number you're instantly gutted and i also forgot to mention that this box comes with four separate tables each with their own neat mechanics on top of that carnival is the first board you'll play on teaching you the ropes with a few little gimmicks like a test your strength that has to be filled in order and this absolutely horrible clown cyber hack bumps things up a notch introducing runs this is a mini game where you add the dice together and fill in that many pure undiluted points but enter the difference between the dice into this impending doom track if that gets filled you dump any points that you'd gain so far in your run it's a horrible push or luck mini game contained within the pinball table where the odds can be skewed in your favor by grabbing a few hacks along the way that will give you an opportunity to re-roll unfavorable dice dragon slayer is my favorite of the tables and gives you a list of spells to cast that'll let you do all kinds of mad combo filled nonsense gain enough xp and you'll level up gaining access to new spells that'll aid you in slaying the dragon and claiming it's horde there is so much going on here and so many ways to navigate this table that i don't even know where to start but if it's all a bit much you can just squash this rat disco fever is the final table and this one has you playing on two separate tables at once in a move called disco inferno rolling doubles will advance the boogie bonus from funky chicken and electric slide to the hustle and what happens when you score the boogie bonus you're reset to hokey pokey of course honestly the best part of this table is the absolute nonsense that it makes you spout on the regular however all the twists and turns introduced by all these boards and their weird little happenings are nothing in comparison to multiball multiball is a golden mechanic multiball is what makes this game magic multiball is the root of all evil i love multiball picture this you've filled in a lot of your board you are low on spaces and high on stress your flippers are almost completely full but then you spy a space a space that when filled will activate multiball here the devil himself comes to you with a bargain you get double points but twice as many pinballs on the table your margin for total pinball mastery is increased but your defeat is twice as likely the odds are not in your favor but think think on the points quinn said the following in his roundup of super skill pinball 4k for his solo print and play video so you're frequently fretting about whether to drop the ball right down to the paddles immediately just to knock it back up while you can this is a shining example of what is known as a coward's move in super skill pinball 4k and it's actually banned in the rulebook you can see it right here letting that ball drop is never an option you're gonna keep it bouncing and you're gonna keep it bouncing for as long as you possibly can because for every failure that you make due to your hubris in another timeline you might succeed in another timeline that ball has just scored you double triple mega points in another timeline you're a pinball guard to put an end to this increasingly rambly and incoherent segment i would absolutely say that i recommend super skill pinball 4k but maybe only if you want to play it solo i've only played this game on my own i've really not played it with multiple people so your mileage may vary but if you're the kind of person that really enjoys taking off achievements and filling in high scores then this is absolutely the game for you look i got a score of 538 and i only cheated once i'm here now to inject myself smoothly into the middle of this video like one of those factory machines that puts cream inside of biscuits and immediately i'm going to derail it with a game that arguably just shouldn't be here wasn't in the script roman roll provided by psc games and designed by david tersey and nick shaw yes you've got chunky whiteboards and colored pens to mark things off with but the internet has pretty resolutely decided that this is more of a resource management non-competitive kind of euro game rather than a true role and write game as determined by science the dna of a role and write game is having collective choice of a shared set of options but sometimes uh those options are drafted individually it will feature dice and or sometimes cards and finally in wrong write games you don't have resources that you collect and spend apart from when you have special powers that you can use that we actually what is a role and right game have we have we covered that yet all right to paraphrase quinn's from about eight minutes ago players use some kind of random generator in the center of the table to make permanent progress on their own little sheet so perhaps the cardinal sin of roman roll then is this middle board that players all write on at different times to interact and compete with one another and honestly that makes a lot of sense i think a lot of the appeal of what we think of as role and write games is this chance to just sit and carefully try and solve our own personal puzzle as well as we can and in a way i guess that makes roll and write games a distillation a lo-fi version of a traditional euro game and so maybe roman roll isn't an aberration in the world of roll and write games maybe it's an inevitable conclusion i feel like i need a pipe for this what could we put a pipe in in post like a ship sherlock i've got so much appreciation for what this is trying to do as an experiment you know it's trying to condense down one of these giant boxes and going hey look to what extent can you take away all of those little cubes all of these things and still retain the essence of what a kind of economic build a euro game can be and the extent to which it succeeds is fabulous you know what every time you get a piece of wood or a brick just writing w or b or s for stone and then just crossing it out when you've used it yeah it doesn't have the thematic oomph of kind of having maybe brown cubes and blue cubes but you know what every time i play a euro game i forget and i just say i'm gonna spend a white cube and a brown cube so not a big deal and you know if you can just remove everything else and instead just have these big chunky plastic dice well i'm kind of there for that now it's not a success in every regard there's a whole system whereby you're building things on rome and you do that by making the shapes on the map and then writing the initials of the building on which is not very readable and a bit rubbish also the presentation of the game is a bit bitterly basic with roman gods that failed to look powerful and severe and instead just look hilariously miserable this one's sad about a bowl this one's sad about an orb this one's sad he got kicked out of the band but quibbles aside this is solid and fun the fact you've got like 95 of the rules of the game written on these gigantic player boards it's really useful particularly because the manual is is awful so anyway listen i wouldn't recommend this game in favor of any of the other games in this video if you said hey do you want to play a role right and then you got this out it's not it's not the same it's a different thing but gosh what a delightful different thing the fact that this is a euro game that you can set up in moments and pack away in moments no bags of cubes no fiddling around and in a world of deluxe editions and game trays and quick setup systems there's a lot to be said for just having less stuff and if that means getting really chunky dice i'm in but now it's time for another game oh it's in the other room it's cartographers provided by thunder works games and designed by geordie aden and i've got a lot of time for this fantasy nonsense scribbly map game each game of cartographers is split into four seasons like the pizza a season ends when you flip over a card that pushes the total of the numbers in the top onto or over the length of that season they get shorter as you go through the game with winter being the shortest season not very realistic to real life winter goes on forever and these cards that you're going to be flipping and everyone's going to be drawing onto their maps they're going to give you choices of things that you then have to draw somewhere on your map so i've got fishing village which means i can do houses or water has to be four in a row i'm gonna do this and then i'm gonna draw on some lovely little waves ah the why are you going to be doing any of this well there's going to be four communal objectives which you're going to be working towards throughout the game and in the first round in spring you're going to score a and b then b and c before you eventually come around to winter in which you scored d and once more a now the beautiful thing about this is you don't end the game with this horrific crunch while you're trying to do all four of these things at once and having a brain meltdown as soon as you've gone past b doesn't matter forget about doing things with spaces you're not going to get points for it ever again now it seems bad but it's good you can forget about it now these four objectives come from a deck and that's the place where you're going to find the most variety in the game which is a bit of a complaint from me frankly because most of the variety comes from a place where the game is most thematically thin and uninteresting even the text at the bottom of the cards which tells you what they actually do is very very small which is kind of a worst case scenario on both regards no nice art but also not clear text it's not the end of the world but it's also not but don't worry because we've got monsters and also ruins and coins so really everything we need for a good night out on the town monsters first of all are a lot of fun in the fact that you've got only four of them see they're gonna be more of them than that but the way these work is you're gonna be adding one each round to the deck of cards that get drawn normally when they come up you actually pass your sheet to the person next to you and they are gonna draw that monster on your map in a place that they believe to be the most irritating any spaces surrounding a monster at the end of a turn are going to lose you negative points so you want to kind of enclose them as best you can in towns and nice lakes and forests as i guess a means of integrating the kobolds into society and making them feel welcome which is probably not a bad approach to crime and punishment the other thing is coins now coins when you completely orthogonally surround a mountain do this you get to cross off a coin this box is just loving life horizontal today every time you get a coin at the end of that round and from every round until the game ends which will happen sooner than you think you're gonna get an extra bonus point finally ruins every time a ruins card is drawn from the deck you draw another card and then whatever that is has to be placed on one of the little ruin spaces on your sheet which is just annoying in a gentle way that's also quite nice and satisfying and also it's worth pointing out that the whole system with monsters there is a solo variant in the game here in which a little bit in the corner of the card tells you which quadrant it has to go into and players can place it themselves that's made for the single player game but obviously if you're trying to play role and rights while socially distancing arguably they're some of the best types of games to do so with then that's cool this game is fast super simple and with a lot of space here for fun idle doodling in between rounds i like it a lot and you know while i really adore the sharp neat nasty edges of metro x a game which tom will be reviewing later in this video and i think enjoys slightly less than i do because i've got a lot of time for this i might even like it more than railroad ink just because i'm a sucker for terrible awful underground systems the reason i love cartographers and the reason i think it's one of my favorites it's because it's just so breezy the fact that yeah you're crunching to try and do the absolute best you can with a randomized setup of things and then you just forget about it the fact that objectives are just gone they're meaningless now you're never gonna think about that ever again that's gone that's gone it's like a knot in your back just suddenly gets worked out into a shrug if you like your rolling right to have a little more bite then i would hold off on this for now they're doing some standalone expansion stuff and some mini things that add a bit of flavor add a bit of crunch i don't really understand don't know what the business model is going to be like for that we're going to have to see how it shakes out it might be really cool it might not be time will tell but if you like something basic and simple and chill nice little pencils nice little maps then i really like cartographers it's a lovely little addition to my roll and right collection and now i'm going to pass over to quinn's for a review of king domino jewel a game which i personally think lacks all of the charm of king domino which is a wonderful game and hinges on an element of competitive interaction that i think doesn't really work and is damp and at best a gimmick turns out when i have to compress my thoughts about a game down to a very short amount of time i'm quite mean queens fun fact i don't actually like cartographers very much for me the fact that that game's random generator is a deck of unique cards meant i didn't know the probability of anything which meant for me half the game was dead on arrival but there's no time to decide who's right and wrong that's what internet comments are for let's talk about king domino duel just like the copenhagen rolling right king domino duel is a miniature spin-off this time from the king domino series of family games which are nice but too simple for my taste but this little fellow hmm quinty likey yeah let's add that one to the list king domino duel stands out and it's a roll and writes specifically for just two players in a genre defined by a lack of player interaction to the point that your friend could leave mid game and you might not notice king domino duel lets you play together with someone sort of kind of a little bit fancy that each round these four dice are rolled someone drafts one the next player takes two and leaves the other to the player who took the first and then you've got your dominoes which you get to add to your map or possibly just try and fit in while causing as little damage as possible dominoes have to either touch your central castle or at least one end has to touch a matching symbol if your domino has crosses add them to and then at the end of the game you figure out your score by multiplying each area of symbols by the number of crosses on those shields but hold on to your pants because each dice you draft that does not have a cross on it lets you make a notch on that line of your side of the wizard's spell book and whichever player reaches that spell first takes it and denies it to their opponent forever letting you perform forbidden domino techniques like splitting dominoes of course the last time that mankind tried to split a domino in real life it resulted in the destruction of doncaster but since the dominoes in this game are only figurative i think you've got a pretty good chance of coming through this game still alive look it makes sense to me that matt does not like this game the best thing about king domino and queen domino and whatever the expansion was called indentured servant domino was that those games were cute and this isn't cute but my problem with the original king domino was that it wasn't tactical enough and this is yeah it's not particularly surprising it's not colourful it's not story rich and in that respect it reminds me of the also pretty great the castles of burgundy the dice game which confusingly was actually the role i'm right look i don't have to defend myself to you this is still a free country for now i think this box is just a neat log conveyor belt that is constantly running off good cute little decisions for you because it's only a two player game and both players are both playing every turn you're constantly just bouncing forth between drafting dice and then placing dice then drafting dyson placing decides the dice it's fast it's tough what do you want what do you want it's got magnets do you like magnets it's got the box has two magnets and it does this so that's perfect for you astronauts who are always leaving comments saying that your box lids are floating away ah crap maybe matt's right maybe this is boring but i do think it's good anyway i'm sure we've saved something truly scintillating and exciting for our final game on this list tom will save us tom savers trains they're the board game world's 18th favorite theme but rather than putting us behind sun-speckled windows with beautiful leafy trees rushing past metro x is content to put us in the dark and grimy underground full of commuters rats and commuting rats but don't worry this layer of grime and grit is hidden under a deliriously clean aesthetic so much so that i wonder if it's designed by the same underground eulogizing weirdos that made phone game classic mini metro tell us tom how does this one work well it starts by rolling a card and putting the number on it into one of these boxes and then ticking off that many spaces on the route it's connected to for example here i have just rolled a four which means i can put a four in this box and cross off one two three four little dots on that root which is great that means that i'm nearly done i've only got one two three four five six seven more spaces so i just need to put a seven in that box but oh the numbers oh the numbers only go up to six and oh dear oh dear this fellow just committed his very first train crime but don't worry there are plenty more to come metro x is a system that is rife with bad decisions and horrible consequences rattling towards you at frightening speeds let's see how this young man continues to goof it let's say the board looks like this and you just pulled a three you want to fill in the green line because you've only got three open spaces on that line and you've got one open box left easy easy points [Music] that's another train crime from me and this one gets a zero out of ten this clown clearly didn't read the section in the rulebook that says that if you reach an already filled station you gotta stop your route there and then matey let's talk about transfers the final part of metro x's slippery puzzle these have you putting an x in the window of the route that you are putting them on and then writing a number in that first available box equal to two times the number of roots that intersect that station so here one two three four roots for eight lovely points at the end of the game [Music] do i need to say more this clueless buffoon thinks he'll score mega points from having a huge transfer station thing that'll fill up every route and score him some points but no it's gonna score him like nothing because he's gonna have to put him in a place that's useless and that's rubbish and such is the slippery serpentine layout of metro x a game that traps you with an ease of rules before crushing you under an avalanche of fine powdery consequences there are ways of getting around the draconian regulations laid out by this game the skip cards let you plonk down stations even if there's interrupting ones and the free card lets you pop a station down at the end of a line if you need to fill in a pesky little space but there's only one of them so you can't count on it but let me roll my cards onto the table here metro x is probably on the weaker end of the spectrum in terms of rolling rights on this list it's still a lovely puzzle but i think it survives fewer plays and part of that might be to do with the lovely if cold presentation that's great the first time but it's simple numbers-based appearance means that deviations in strategy don't seem as immediate or as exciting as they would be in a game a little more visual honestly i'm finding it kind of hard to pin down why exactly i'm lukewarm on this box and i think it might just come down to a lack of mechanics that make you go ooh it's very frictionless it's very simple and it's good but i don't think it's great what it is great at though is being a solid intro to the genre because the teach is just ultra smooth you can do it in one hot minute but ultimately your mileage with this thing will be entirely dependent on how much you enjoy the noise that your friends make when things aren't going so well for them it's a lovely game to show to people but i don't know if it's a solid addition to the rolling right cannon it's good it's not great it's good it's very good i like it and it's good but it's not great it's good that's great tom but it's not your favorite the name of the video is your favorite so if you could just maybe review something a fine move tom if you enjoyed this video we've got another one well we've got loads actually but we have one on our five favorite new card games so you can give that a little clickety click or this is the video that youtube thinks you should watch youtube is judging you why don't you judge youtube right back by picking which of these things that's not a bad link actually which these two things you want to watch thank you very much for watching the video everybody

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 174,679

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, Tom Brewster, roll'n'writes, Yahtzee, Copenhagen: Roll & Write, Super Skill Pinball 4cade, Rome & Roll, Cartographers, Kingdomino: Duel, Metro X, Roll and Write, RnR, Roland Wright., Top 5

Id: KjptHj_rfxI

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/StadstheEidolon]

Just a note about Cartographers - it's almost mandatory to buy a cheap set of pencil crayons or two and bundle them with your game. The chill, satisfying nature of the game gets amplified so wonderfully when you are shading in vibrant green forests or sparking blue seas.

[u/DerBK]

One of the funniest board game videos i've seen in a while.

Tom completely stole the show with the whole Pinball segment.

[u/Faxxobeat]

Quinn's list of "Things to never say again"

[u/Z3M0G]

Nice, I'm yet to add a R&W to my collection... perhaps this video will help!!

[u/QuoteGiver]

I should not have laughed THAT much at Sherlock-Pipe.

And yet I totally did.

[u/brtd90]

Tom's shirt disturbs me

[u/Christian_Bennett]

A roll and write I’d definitely recommend is Welcome to Dinoworld - two different game modes (one light, one heavy) make for very cute but quite tricky puzzles.

[u/BillyMoustache]

Great video although the fact that Qwinto made an appearance without being reviewed AND without a Quinns pun means my day is ruined and my disappointment is immeasurable.

[u/sicsided]

I'm just gonna plug one of my favorite roll n writes right now and it's a free print and play: Der Clou Roll & Heist. 1-3 player co-op that is similar to Ganz Schon Clever (Pretty Clever) but you fill in abilities to perform heists.