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Who's the more foolish? The fool or fool that plays after the fool?
United States
DURHAM
North Carolina
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You must have seen those wonderful posts describing how people have created their version of a game like Magic Realm or Merchant of Venus with hand-crafted tiles and lovingly sculpted terrain. You read them and think that was SO COOL and you wish you could do something as creative and awesome as that.
This is not one of those posts.
The world of Print and Play is forbidding because, unlike the professionally produced game, you actually have to make the game before you can play it. Which is a pain and a barrier to getting started. Plus, some of these games might not be worth the effort you put in. So a combination of laziness and circumspection might lead you to neglect this little niche altogether and play something else instead.
Then again, they are FREE and that is a persuasive argument for investigating.
Of course, they are not really free and you can spend a whole lot of money on tricking out a primo (or even merely decent) version.
So a combination of laziness, circumspection and cheapness might lead you to consider how you might play some of these games without too much trouble. That was my inspiration anyway.
For this first post, I will offer a couple of games that actually are as advertised. For very few Print and Play games are just Print it out, then play it. Most require components and tiles and cards. But here are a couple that just require the print-out on paper, a pencil (eraser optional but useful) and some dice.
Reiner Knizia's Decathlon is a quite well known print and play. Inspired partly by Yahtzee, it is a series of mini-games based on the 10 athletic events of the Decathlon. Each requires you to use your dice in different ways and for an abstract dice game it does a pretty good job of capturing its theme. For example, the Long Jump has a run-up phase (where you roll dice - freezing at least one each roll - and if the total is over 9 it is a foul jump), then you roll the frozen dice to get a total jump.
This is playable by several players in competative fashion. But a lot of print and play games are solo, like my next item, Utopia Engine. In this game, you are an engineer trying to reassemble a device to prevent Doomsday. You have to locate each part and then activate and assemble it. The entire game is played out on 2 sheets of paper, in which one is portrait and the other landscape, thus you can refer to key tables and information on the lower sheet while working on the upper one. A very neat mechanic, which I saw materialize in a thread here on BGG, along with many refinements of the game.
the two pages you need for the game
I liked several of the mechanics for this game, including the searching mechanic (where you roll 3 sets of paired dice, filling in spaces, then if the numbers are close together you find something, else you fail, or you encounter something nasty!). It is quite difficult at first and has an easy method of adjusting the difficulty in the number of days you have to complete your quest.
Two games that you just have to print and play. There are others, of course - feel free to recommend them in the comments. And there is hardly any excuse for not trying them. Just print and play.
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