Jeremiah McCallHey history educators wanting to make games (and have students make games) Pro tip for designing low cost Roll&Write games 🧵 I was reminded in my talk on Friday how important it is to be able to use history game pedagogies at low cost. That's one reason I started exploring boardgame space these past 5 years or so. Hands down, the boardgame of choice for low cost is the Roll&Write. At its simplest, players have a record sheet, roll dice and make decisions to fill in the sheet. So you need some dice, some paper, and some pencils. Beyond low expense, Roll&Writes are terrific for classrooms too because they have pretty much zero break-down time and work costs -- just collect record sheets & dice & hand out again next play session. Those logistics are often a barrier. 1/
Now I still have, I hope, most of two decades left in history ed, and maybe a bit more than 2 in writing to you all so I have work to do on this. But, for now, please go back and read this post I made:
Adapting a commercial game (do NOT plagiarize text or steal images) is a well-honored practice in game design & it would be relatively easy for you or a student as a fledgling game designer in history to create your own fully paper & regular die variant of RTTA for any pre-modern state anywhere. I even made a prototype roll and write for missionary religions (I may describe it in that post; can't remember)
Anyway, as always, would love to help you do this: as many of you can attest, I LOVE getting cold emails dms whatever w/ questions abt history game design. Go get 'em my friends!