How a Simple Genre Sparked Our Next Big Game Idea

We play a lot of board games in the office, and we have gathered quite a collection over the last 10 years. When I met our game designer Filip almost 10 years ago, I had no idea about the board game industry. I played other video games, but my knowledge of board games was limited to mainstream games such as Monopoly or Scrabble or games like Dungeons and Dragons. 

In the following years, Filip introduced me to both his friend circle and to the many various board game genres, including games that he himself had made. I eventually realized that I preferred worker placement Eurogames. Whenever there was a dice game where luck was too big of a factor, I generally avoided it. Ameritrash as a genre didn’t really vibe with me and I mostly kept playing Eurogames.

However, there was one genre of dice games that I always enjoyed, Roll and Write. In most of our sessions we’d usually play one or two big games that took about an hour and a half to finish and then before going home we’d play a small, short Roll and Write game to end things off. As it turns out, a lot of these games ended up being quite popular and they are all very easy to get into.

On the flip side, when Filip and I started working together I introduced him to a lot of Roguelikes such as Spelunky, Binding of Isaac and FTL. We eventually settled on Eyes in the Dark as our first game, but it didn’t really play to Filip’s strengths as a board game designer as much. Fast forward to today and we have Grimroll. A game that’s a blend of two very specific genres that we haven’t really seen anyone try to pull off.

What is “Roll and Write”?

Today I don’t want to talk about Grimroll specifically, instead I’d like to take you through the board game genre that inspired it.

Roll and Write games are very simple, they come in small boxes and usually contain some dice, pencils and a block of paper with fields to cross out. The game that could be argued about starting the genre is Yahtzee. The concept is simple, you throw some dice, get some numbers or colors or values from these dice and then cross them out in some fashion on a piece of paper. Pass the dice to other players and they do the same. The genre gained new life in the 2010s as modern designers embraced its simple mechanics while adding depth and strategic complexity.

Sometimes other players get to use some of your dice when it’s not their turn and other times certain dice can be re-rolled or modified in some way. Games are usually short, and you can play multiple rounds and teach them to people quickly.

Eventually the genre expanded, and designers started experimenting with modifying some of those core mechanics. Games like Welcome To… trade dice for cards while keeping the gameplay intact and Railroad Ink challenges players to connect railways and highways with lines and symbols. There are also games like Cartographers which have players drawing on map sheets to score reputation points. 

While a lot of these newer games introduce a lot of complex mechanics we keep coming back to one of our favorites in this genre. A game called That’s pretty clever by Wolfgang Warsch. It features a mechanic that a lot of the other Roll and Write games don’t have but makes the entire experience much more engaging. It’s a simple chaining of combos, by crossing out numbers in one spot you get a bonus action to cross out numbers in another one, which then in turn might give you more bonus actions and so on. This feeling of chaining multiple combos together is very satisfying and rewards the player for making smart choices.

The potential

Sometime last summer Filip realized that he could turn this genre into a video game, while most Roll and Write games are a multiplayer experience, Filip saw a potential for a single player experience where the structure of the game is that of a Roguelike and the mechanics are that of a Roll and Write board game. 

While it’s true that a lot of Roll and Write games are a social experience, some of them do feel like Solitaire. Most players will be busy looking at their own sheets and figuring out strategies that don’t always depend on other players’ actions.

When we started researching this idea, we realized that while there’s plenty of video games with dice mechanics (Dicey Dungeons, Dice and Fold, Die in the Dungeon), not even one uses the Roll and Write mechanics.

Filip got to work and made a fully functional prototype out of cardboard. This made it so we could test out the core mechanics of the game before we wrote a single line of code. If the game worked on cardboard, then surely it would benefit from the added design space of a digital medium. Very quickly after doing a couple of play tests we realized we had something truly special, so we got to work and digitized the game over a couple of months. Our assumptions were true, the fact that the digital version automated a lot of the mechanics meant that we now had another huge design space to explore.

In the next blog post we’ll go into more details about how Grimroll specifically transfers the roll and write mechanics into the digital space and what it does with added ease of play. In the meantime, please wishlist the game on Steam.