Tabletop 101
Best Roll & Write Games for Your Game Night

by Rossy, Quartermaster @ The Guild Hall
May 21 2020
Sometimes you feel like playing a board game, but you don’t want to go through the effort of setting up 20 tiles, 30 plastic units, and 6 different decks. Sometimes you want something short, fun, and easy to explain. What you’re looking for are the popular roll & write games that are usually small, have few components, and are fun because you can write and draw on your player sheet! Here are our suggestions.
Corinth
First, let’s start in Corinth, in the 4th century BCE. In this game, you will take the role of a merchant trying to sell goods such as Persian carpets, Cretan olive oil, Roman grapes, and Egyptian spices, collect goats or gather gold. On your turn, you roll all the dice, select one row of gold, goods or goats, and proceed to mark off a certain area on your sheet. Ultimately, the goal is to choose the best combination of dice and actions to have the highest final score.
Rolled West
Next, let’s travel to the well known Wild West. In this quick western game, you roll four custom dice your turn and chose one of them to represent the terrain you are on. After that, you take the rest of the dice and spend them as resources to build settlements or make contracts that give you points. The goal of the game is to take the best combination of actions to get the highest final score.
Welcome to…
Our next stop will be the famous American 50s. Welcome to… is a roll & write game (without dice) that you can play in 1 to 100 players. Here you have to build the perfect 50s American suburban neighborhood with just pencils and numbered houses. Instead of dice, you flip cards that grant you actions or have various effects, and the goal of the game is, of course, to make the most points.
Patchwork Doodle
And finally, after all this traveling, what better way to unwind than curling up in an armchair and knitting a cozy blanket? Patchwork Doodle is a game where you knit a blanket by playing something similar to Tetris – you roll a die, you pick a card with a fabric shape on it, and you try to fit it on your board by drawing it. The goal of the game is to cover as much of your board as you can because each blank square will make you lose points!
We hope you had fun on this journey with us and that you found these roll & write games interesting enough to try out. If you’d like to get your hands on any of these or similar games, be sure to check out our online shop.
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