Dr. Finn's Book of Solo Strategy & Word Games ►►► the best bang for buck boardgame bargain!

0:00 Hey everybody, the following is an excerpt from the monthly Rodel rounds up and if you'd like to see the rest of the round up, you can hit that eye up in the top right corner of the screen or if you'd like to know more about the game, you can follow link down the show notes. And with that out of the way, let's talk about Dr. Finn's Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games, which is a mouthful. Um, and I'm going to slow it down a bit cuz we are going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff here. Here's what this is. This is a book that is full to the brim of a little roll and write puzzle games that you can play, uh, eight of them in fact. Three of them are word games and the other five are a wide variety of kind of Euro-y roll and write style games. And all but one of them can be played bingo style. If you pick up this game, which you can order direct from Amazon right now uh, for like almost nothing, what you do is you just need a handful of dice and a pencil and you just open the page to whichever of the eight games you want to play and you just play it. And there's a like a little scoreboard in the front of the manual that you can keep track of your scores and all of that. And uh, yeah.

1:07 Every single one of the games of the eight games that I have played here are phenomenal. Any of them could have been a standalone roll and write on their own. They are high enough quality. And um, while it says solo in the title, you can totally play these multiplayer cuz it's one of those Did I already say bingo style games where hey, the dice that get rolled all players have access to those and it's who uses them to best effect. There's only one game that is a true solo only game. And so, um, here's the deal. If you like roll and writes and you get this, e- whether you're playing it just for yourself or sharing with your friends and family, you're going to enjoy it quite a bit and then ultimately what you're going to do when you're down to like the final page cuz if I recall correctly, there are like eight eight pages of each of the eight games. You can play each of the eight games eight times. But after you played one of these games seven times, that eighth page, you're just going to get out some scissors, you're going to cut it out and you're going to either want to uh, make a photocopy of that so you can just play it over and over again or you get um, some of those uh, plastic sleeves you could slide it in and then just use um, pen and you can play it over and over again that way like what Jen and I do.

2:18 This is an excellent thing and it this is maybe one of the best raw game play for buck bargains you will ever see in the board game industry because again, they're all great. And now, I have played six of these eight games and um, I actually I tried to do a run through for Patreon backers of my show. I did I I filmed them all and I had a great time playing them and then I found out, oh, my sound was screwed up and there was no sound and like ah, so I've got a two-hour long silent video of me playing this. So, I'm going to tell you about six the six of the eight games I played. And hey James, my editor James Wood of That Board Game Show, um, could you uh, you know, I was like you know, put them in like a grid, you know, for for the six different things.

3:05 Right. So, uh, first of all, let's talk about Cosmic Run Mission One. This is the only game of the set that you can't play with other people because you have the ability to manipulate the dice and change them and then the dice wouldn't be the same for everybody. Um, but it is basically just um, Steve Finn, designer Steve Finn going back to one of his evergreen titles. I think this is now maybe the fifth game he has made in the Cosmic Run setting. And this the notion of this is there are several planets. We are rolling dice to activate spaceships to get closer and closer and closer and we're running. We are racing to get to those planets before other stuff. Whether it's in the previous games it's like intergalactic disaster like meteors. In this game, you're racing against other ships. And it's sharp. It has always been great. Uh, this one you roll a bunch of dice, you pick some for yourself and the one that's left over that you chose not to take, that's the one the aliens use to race you. And so, you might take a die you don't want because you can't let the aliens take another step forward and leaving that die that you don't want could lead you to lose. It's a sharp game. Cosmic Run has always been great. This one is fun, fun, fun. And again, it's the only true solo of of the bunch. Uh, then there is Penpal's, which is a lovely little um, farm simulator where basically there's a big pasture full of tons of animals and um, we are rolling dice and you know, using them to draw different shapes of fencing cuz we're trying to pen off the

4:37 animals in different pens. And you're either trying to make enclosed pens that have a lot of variety of different types of animals or a lot of the same type of animals, which means you might make pens that are really tough and string all over the place to get that one last sheep over there so you can get five sheep instead of four or three sheep so you can get the maximum points. But it's not only that, you're also trying to make sure um, in each of the pens that there's um, water uh, for the animals as well. And so, it's a fun, clever spatial puzzle and again, uh, all of the games including this one uh, you know, everybody's rolling dice, everybody you because you know, hey, I'm I'm going to draw this shape. I'm going to use that die and draw this shape and okay, that means that shape is gone. And over as the longer it goes, the tougher it gets cuz you have fewer and fewer options you have as you're trying to squeeze create those last few pens. You can't possibly pen all the animals in, uh, but you do your best and it's sharp.

5:29 It maybe was my favorite of the bunch. I really liked it quite a bit. Penpal's. Then, oh, but there I also loved My Perfect City, which is a little SimCity style game where again, the dice you roll uh, are assigned to different, you know, uh, Tetris shapes, you know, the square and the L and the and the the S. And what's the other one? Oh, the T, right? And you know, so there's a bunch of different Tetris shapes you can see on the page. Um, and when you roll a die, it gives you access to one of the other but once you've taken that, it's gone and the other ones that are gone as well that are associated with it. And uh, you know, and they come pre-selected with combinations of like civic buildings, parks, apartment buildings, homes, and something else. I don't remember what the other one was or you know, what you know, like five or six different types of buildings. And of course, all these buildings have different ways to score.

6:22 The apartment bui- blocks want to be on the outskirts. The uh, civic buildings want to have variety of stuff in their rows and columns. Oh, no, no, that's the banks. That was the other one. The banks want to have variety of stuff in rows and columns. The uh, civic buildings want to be surrounded on all sides by variety. Uh, you know, they they all have different ways of scoring. And um, you know, we played a lot of city games like this but this one is super hard and crunchy. This is much harder than Quadropolis. A much bigger challenge to do well in this game and I already love SimCity style games and this is a phenomenal one. Uh, it was uh, what is it? My Perfect City. Oh, then there's The Little Flower Shop Open for Business. This is a buy low, sell high business sim where you are using the dice to um, you know, invest in different types of flowers and also the dice have a tendency to raise the um, or lower, crash the value of the different types of flowers. So, you're collecting ones hoping, you know, you're collecting the ones that that have a high premium.

7:26 They're worth four. But at any given time, the dice can pivot on you and all of a sudden, oh, I was collecting a lot of the begonias because they're selling for four a pop and I just need one more and I'll cross the threshold and I'll sell them but then at the end of the round, you roll a die and it says, okay, one of these um, flower types changes in value. And you can see if it's the begonias If it's THE BEGONIAS, THEY'LL CRASH from being worth four to one. Oh, please, I shouldn't push my luck. I should sell them now. Don't don't try to get No, I'll get one more cuz it's only a what? A one in six CHANCE THEY'LL BE NO, THEY'RE the ones that crashed and now they're only worth one and I've got all these begonias. What am I going to do? But then on top of that, there are different objectives that you can assign to yourself to ensure you've got um, like post-game sales that okay, I'm trying to sell I'm trying to sell them at the right time.

8:14 Um, but sometimes I'm just I got to s- I have to sell something every turn. Okay, fine. There's nothing else for me to sell. I guess I'll sell them. Oh, no cuz it'll take too long for them to increase in value and I'm running out of time and I need to make money. Um, but then you're also trying to do all this buying and selling at the same time ensuring you'll have stock at the end of the game that can fulfill your end game orders and score extra points there, too. It is sharp. I have to admit, I'm not the biggest buy low, sell high market type guy but this one is done very well. I like this a lot more than some of the big ones I've seen over the years. And then what was the other one? Oh, uh, Crunch the Numbers. This one is basically a dynamically generated Sudoku puzzle for lack of a better term that is dice driven. If you love dice and you love Sudoku or I'm sure all of us have somebody in our lives that would happily play Yahtzee with you and they really like doing the Sudoku puzzle in the in the newspaper or if we still had newspapers. And so, this is the perfect game. It was far from my favorite but it worked really well and it was really sharp and really clever to crunch those numbers. So, I could see it having really great use cases uh, for a lot of people who might not want to play your favorite pastime with you but oh, they'll play Crunch the Numbers. They'll crunch the numbers with you. So, those are five of the six. Um, three of them or three of five of eight. Three of them are word games. I played one of them, which was Word Wrap. And I got to tell you folks, this is probably the hardest

9:44 Scrabble style word game I've ever played. I've played a bunch of them over the years. This one is super challenging where the dice rolled, again, going back to the different Tetris shapes, tells you the type of Tetra shape you can use to lasso a bunch of letters on this big grid. And um when you lasso those letters, you then have to spread those letters however you want a bunks a bunch a bunch of different potential words that are anywhere from like three to seven letters long. And so, you could Oh, yeah. Oh, and you know and and Scrabble-style, different letters have different value. A K is much more valuable to put in your word than an E, as you might imagine. And so, um the trick is Right. Okay, I'm going for the seven I'm going for kitchen. I remember I tried to go for kitchen and I couldn't quite pull it off cuz I started with a K cuz it was in a a tripler. So, a K was four. It was going to be a 12 points if I could get if I could and I went for K and I didn't pay attention because then I'm trying to lasso letters to make sure I can finish that word kitchen. But not all the letter word letters I'm going to lasso are going to do that. So, I'm trying to put other letters into other words to build other words. And I'm trying to come up with words that could pivot and become other things. I had an oom. It was going to be, you know, zoom or or no, I I forget what it was. Uh but anyway, it was great. And like I said, it was the crunchiest, most challenging word game I've ever played.

11:07 And I liked it, but I don't I'm not big on word games. So, I have to admit I did not play the other ones which were um spell it out and uh leftover letters cuz I'd already been challenged enough. Anyway, that just gives you a little bit of a taste. These are all fantastic, phenomenal games. And again, you can go buy this online right now. I think you can order it direct from Dr. Finn's website or you can order it through Amazon, I think, anywhere in the world. I'm not sure about that, but you can go check it out. Uh um and yeah, if you like roll and writes, you have to give this a go. It is uh it it is incredible what Dr. Finn has done here. And by the way, I should say, uh this is a sneak peek because apparently this was successful enough that he's doing another one. The next book he's going to do um is going to be all two-player games, I think. And he is sending it to me and I'm looking forward to it. Um but yeah, uh Dr. Finn's Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games, highly highly recommended.

12:14 My only problem with it is the form factor. I get why he did this because this is the way he could get these games to you the cheapest. I wish it instead had come in a box with a bunch of uh sheets and you know, all that and it was just a bit more traditional in its packaging. But if that were the case, it would cost so much more. And then he wouldn't sell as many, and he probably wouldn't be incentivized to make a follow-up. So, I can't fault him. I just kind of wish. And who knows, maybe somewhere down the road, if if this thing is successful enough, he will um you know, do a a reprinting of it and you'll put it in boxed form because my only problem with it is I want to be able to put it on my shelf with all my other boxes full of roll and writes, too. Um but if you're the type who loves roll and writes, and especially if you go for print and play roll and writes, and sure you're used to Right. Okay, it's my own paper, it's my own pencil, it's my own desk I'm playing with. These are some of the best roll and write experiences I've had. They are all crackerjack brilliant. There's so much variety, you get so much. Again, you cannot beat the val the you know, the the val the gameplay value you get for your money on number five, Dr. Finn's Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games.

13:26 And thanks for watching, folks. If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe. It makes a huge difference, believe me. But with that out of the way, if you'd like to see some more over on the left, you can find a playlist of a whole bunch more Roto Rapid Reviews. Up in the top right, there's the latest thing that's been added to the channel. And in the bottom right, you've got something YouTube recommends. Okay, folks, thanks for watching.