I've been intrigued by the problems of roll-and-move games for a while, so I'll be interested to see what this week's TiGD topic throws up.
I understand I'm meant to write a few paragraphs to kick off the discussion, so here goes...
“Roll-and-move”, a common process through which players move tokens of some kind according to the roll of a die or dice, must be one of the most familiar game mechanics to the public. Most commonly associated with those games where players race to a particular square (for example, Snakes & Ladders), it is largely problematic when used in games which wish to be decided by skill, rather than simple luck.
The wider concept involved in this is that of “track advancement” games. These are games where the game centres on the movement of pieces over some form of track. The winner could be either the first player to reach a particular square, or the furthest advanced along the track when the end of the game is triggered.
I've touched on the wider topic of "track advancement" simply because modern designers have, understandably, approached roll-and-move with the intention of redeeming it... When a non-gamer thinks of board games, they will almost certainly think of 'roll and move' games; this is hardly surprising given the dominance of luck-dominated, or even decision-less luck fests, in the mass market.
David Parlett, writing in his Oxford History of Board Games, pointed out that all civilizations have had racing games, often with a roll-and-move mechanic. As he suggests, it is an easy jump to go from recording the cumulative scores of a number of dice rolls on a track, to a simple roll-and-move game: as long one has defined the score to be reached (i.e. The number of the space to be reached), they are mechanically identical, even if the roll-and-move game has introduced a more overt “racing” theme. The squares can naturally be arranged in any formation, so as to suggest a coiled snake, or a road, or a globe to be circumnavigated, or similar, without mechanical change.
The departure, however, comes when you “load” squares on a board with special functions. The very best example of this, to my mind, is Snakes & Ladders, which is both a puzzle (in why a pure luck-fest should have proved so popular for over a century!) and a very wide-spread example of roll-and-move. Here, some squares provide a bonus to your score (i.e. A jump to a higher square) or subtraction (i.e. A jump to a lower square), and this general principle can be traced, in Western gaming at least, to the Game of Goose. A seventeenth century game apparently commissioned by the Medici family for presentation to Philip II of Spain, the game featured a track within an image of a Goose, with squares providing penalties or rewards familiar to modern players of Snakes & Ladders; all that was missing was the neat graphical representation of advancement or demotion represented by the snakes and ladders in that game (i.e: it would have said "go to no.12" on square no. 33, rather than showing that demotion graphically).
The late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century saw an explosion of the devising of new games of this type, which I call 'Goose-style', as they deserve to be highlighted as a specific subdivision of roll-and-move. These were proprietorial game, with attempts to patent their aesthetically original designs, which used themes as varied as yachting, the ages of men's lives, history, geographical tours or sports. Some readers may know the Mansion of Happiness, an early Victorian example of a morality Goose game. The mechanics of these are not generally very impressive, with art and themes being the only (although, in those respects, significant) merits of them.
Whilst we can probably dismiss the most basic role-and-move games as pointless luck-fests, it is important not to dismiss the entire mechanic. For example, Parlett points out that such games can quickly introduce a very basic decision, by, for example, providing multiple pieces per player and expecting a choice to be made about which to move on a turn (e.g: Ludo, Parcheesi, Sorry!). The most notable way of introducing skill is to make the real game a gambling one, with the roll-and-move board a race on which to place bets, and the skill being in when odds are good enough to bet on a particular piece. Also, providing branches in the track, perhaps in the form of shorter but more perilous alternatives to the regular route, is one obvious way in which roll-and-move games introduced a suggestion of skillfulness.
I'd be personally interested to know whether people agree with my suggestion that roll-and-move is intrinsically a "problem" mechanic, which has to be specifically tinkered with in order to be used in a skill-based game. Perhaps I'm being too negative. But I do feel that the question, for me at least, is how to modify roll-and-move, or subvert it, to make a very different sort of game to snakes-and-ladders or the endless roll-and-move-and-draw-a-card Move tie-ins in Toys 'R Us. For that reason, I hope people will forgive me if we wander onto games such as Hare & Tortoise, where cards are explicitly used to create a track racing game that departs from roll-and-move
Thanks,
Richard.
The first board game I designed (along with my wife) was a roll and move based game.
It was a marketplace game where players would move around different market areas, each area having cheaper or more expensive items for players to buy, collect, auction and sell. The mechanic was boradened by giving characters multiple paths to take, though each path was one-way so a player had to take their chances and live with them. The paths around the cheapest markets contained the mose costly spaces, the opposite being true of the most expensive markets.
The mechanics of the roll-and-move worked to give players hard decisions to make about the real focus of the game, which was collecting (hence the name Collectibility for the game). It is always interesting to see if a player would risk the costly path for a shot at the cheaper markets rather than paying a little more for about the same thing at a market along a safer path. Like I always say, a good game is all about the decisions you make!