Designer: Corné van Moorsel
Artist: Steven Tu
Publisher: Cwali
Players: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30-50 minutes
Times Played: 8 with purchased copies or convention library copies
This is going to be a post about the paths we take. I don’t think I mean in some sort of life choices sense. More the physical directions we go.
Here’s one:
It’s for elevation. I told my wife that when I get dementia or am in any similar situation, to take me back to that trail. I just found recently that alltrails.com will show you these elevation graphs of given trails. This specific trail brought me an unexplainable amount of mental comfort. If I remember it or not, if I’m aware of what’s happening or not -if something can break through to bring me solace, it’ll be that trail.
Here’s another.
One day last year, that’s the sequence of paths I took. A sort of double figure-8.
I like to count stop signs on the way to work. This thru street has 8. The next has 7, but is one block further out of the way. Is there a time saving. That highway exit leads to x stop lights while the next one has y, but it also will involve z left turns. If I take the bus, it’s a larger time commitment, but I’m free from driving and supporting public transit and other things; it is a much different path.
Here’s another one.
This time a second or third grade project to map out the path between your house and school. Glad to see I noted where the ice cream parlor was and that I was distinguishing between banks and savings and loans.
A few years ago, a friend mapped out the patterns of his day and designed his new house around the paths of his home life.
In general, I don’t notice the paths in my life (despite being very aware of them), but I’m coming to recognize that it’s something featured in many board games that I love, and it’s important to me in an effort to understand myself, that I trace back the games I love to my life outside of these games. In my ongoing efforts to catch up with games I love that we’ve never reviewed, today I’m going to talk about Habitats.
10 Great Roll ‘n Writes (Article by Chris Wray)
The “roll ‘n write” genre is having a moment. Though the mechanic has existed for quite some time — I’d (perhaps controversially) describe Yahtzee as a roll ‘n write — the number of new title available has exploded in the past couple of years. As a genre, Roll ‘n Writes tend to be easy to learn, inexpensive, and fast paced, all factors that explain their popularity.
Today’s article is the start of a new series that features 10 great games in a given subcategory. I pick a mechanic, theme, publisher, etc. Then we here at the Opinionated Gamers all vote behind the scenes to create a list of 10 great games that meet the criteria. We’ll try to do an article a month, and I’d love your suggestions about future lists. The next article in the series will be 10 Great Knizia Games.
The Methodology
For purposes of this project, I simply asked everybody to vote for 10 great roll ‘n writes. I made no attempt to offer a definition. Each member of the OG was offered the chance to vote for up to 10 games. They could give one game a 15, one game a 14, one game an 13, all the way down to giving one game a 6. We all put our votes into a spreadsheet. Any OG writer could add games, provided that they were willing to give it a vote. We then added up the points for each game and picked the top 10.
We had 16 OG-ers vote, and 38 different games received votes. To get on the list took a minimum of seven writers rating the game decently well. That wasn’t a rule, but rather how the breakdown naturally worked out. There’s actually great consensus towards the top of our list.
Without further ado, here are the 10 great roll ‘n writes!
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