Roll-and-write games are games where there are dice and there are ways players can record information. That’s all a roll-and-write needs. It’s dizzying when I realise there’s this kind of design space I literally never considered. Now, I understand this being gamer culture, someone is going to look at me and go get a load of this guy, never played a roll-and-write, thinks he’s qualified to talk about games and to that person I will say, look, that’s very needlessly hurtful and also every day we all discover something new so maybe relax a little and try to enjoy the world we live in in the small ways we can, Chad. I don’t think that person’s named Chad, but the odds aren’t any worse than any other name so let’s go with Chad.

Utility

It’s a format ripe for print-and-play. You don’t need anything but dice, which can be standard dice or random dice or any old garbage you want. You could make it build off a literally random assortment of dice, or you could make it care about your specific D&D dice

It seems it could scale well. One player could roll a handful of die and then a whole table of people could all react to it with their own little territory. This makes it useful for games with simultaneous play, but also means the game could be a solitaire game that can be shared!

It lets players make individual choices! Players don’t just have to write standard game information on their board – it could feature rooms for things like a name for your space-ship or the character’s interests!

It’s got a lot of space for assets! Cards have to do a ton of work in a small amount of space and because cards are small objects, text and symbols have to be pretty large. But a sheet you’re meant to look at can use a lot of contiguous space to look pretty!

It can have memory! You can have sheets that give information about what to carry over to the next sheet!

I’m pretty interested to explore this space. One thing that struck me researching the genre is how many of these games are theme light and system heavy. I’d like to see if I can do something that works differently, that has a strong, meaningful theme that lets people feel connected to the thing they’re building.

Limitations

In the end, if you’re writing on pads, they want to be disposable or they want to be dry-erase. That’s not an easy cost to overcome. There’s also kinda a sad undercurrent when you print out pads for roll-and-write games – I mean in a lot of cases people play a game 2-3 times and that’s it. If you provide a pad of 80 sheets for a game that’ll only ever use 8, you’re paying extra money for your own optimism.

Examples

Castles of Burgundy, Yahtzee, Pass The Pigs to an extent.