Build Waterlines and Mining Colonies at Home, Then Hit the Hermagor Market

In November 2021, designers Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon launched new publisher Postmark Games with a Kickstarter campaign for the roll-and-write game Voyages, a game that would be available solely as a print-at-home game.

More generally, all of Postmark Games' releases will be designed for printing at home, an approach that Dunstan and Muldoon explain here. (If you missed that KS campaign, you can visit the Postmark Games website to purchase Voyages.)

I'm not sure whether I missed earlier releases along this line or whether Dunstan and Muldoon were simply at the edge of a wave, but I've now seen many games — almost all of them roll-and-write designs — published in the same manner. Yes, many Kickstarter campaigns would offer a print-and-play version of a game as one level of support, but now some are going all-in — print-and-play or bust.

First-time designer Colleen Williams of Meeplechase Games, for example, has her roll-and-write design Waterline on Kickstarter (KS link) with an incredibly modest goal of $150. Here's how the game works:

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In Waterline, you and each other player are trying to build a single pipeline to connect openings in your player grid — but to maximize your score, you want to do more than just make a connection.

On a turn, the active player rolls the two six-sided dice, then each player uses the die results as they wish to draw pipe segments in their grid. You can use the die numbers separately for basic pipe or sum their values to use one of the special connectors. If doubles were rolled, well, too bad; you get a rock and need to place that somewhere in your grid. If a 7 comes up, you can choose any two basic pipe or one special pipe. Some spots on your player sheet are already filled in, so you can incorporate those pieces or avoid them as you wish. Rocks — you just want to avoid those.

After a certain number of dice rolls, the game ends, and if you have not completed your waterline, you score no points and lose. If you have, then you score based on how well you used existing pipes, how many rows and columns you filled with objects (including rocks and unused pipe), how many starred spaces you incorporated into your pipeline, the total number of pipes used, and whether you used more corner pieces than everyone else.

Another first-timer taking this approach is Matt Parkinson of Empee Games with the roll-and-write game Wine Management (KS link), which was inspired by his love of Viticulture.

Here's a brief take on the game:

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In Wine Management, players run competing vineyards. Using the values of two out of three rolled dice, players select an action, and a multiplier each round. The actions are:

—Plant vines
—Harvest vines to produce grapes
—Process grapes to make wines
—Complete wine orders
—Hire workers to unlock one-time bonuses
—Deliver tours of your vineyard to gain popularity

Players must balance all the possible actions to maximize their points.

• Other established designers have also released games in this manner, with Steve Finn of Dr. Finn's Games adapting his 2021 tile-laying game Mining Colony to a print-and-play format under the name Mining Colony Duel, which was Kickstarted at the start of 2022. Here's a summary of gameplay:

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Mining Colony Duel is a 1-2 player "BYOP" (bring your own pencil) adaptation of Mining Colony, a print-and-play game that requires no components other than the printed sheets and pencils.

In the game, you build a mining colony on a distant planet. At the start of each round, players bid for resources, which include polyomino tiles, domes, landing pads, and science stations. After players reveal their bids, the players place (draw) the resources onto their sheets, trying to accomplish various things, such as having multiple items of the same type in a row or column.

After eight rounds, players score based on the development of their colonies.

• Designer Emanuelle Ornella of Mind the Move has released his first design in a decade — Hermagor Market, an adaptation of his 2006 game Hermagor — through a short-run Kickstarter campaign, with the game now being available for purchase on his website.

Says Ornella, "The print-at-home model is a brilliant idea for a new way to produce and deliver games since it cuts costs and time. Of course you cannot design all possible games, but having fun and spending little money is a win-win thing."

As for what the game is like:

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In Hermagor Market, players compete to be the richest merchant. They will collect goods from the famous market and travel from town to town to sell at a profit, following the cheapest path when they move but also selecting the best town to sell. The game lasts 32 turns, with three types of turns taking place:

—A collection turn in which each player uses the same die roll to determine which good and how many of that good they can collect from the market.
—A move-and-sell turn in which each player can move their merchant and sell goods in a bundle.
—A maintenance turn in which warehouses must be paid.

The goal is to have the most profit and be the richest merchant of the land of Hermagor.

Hermagor Market is a print-and-play game for 1 to an infinite number of players. Print a sheet for each player, provide them with one pawn and a pen, and you are ready to play as long as one person has three dice to roll!

When you collect goods from the market, you use two of the dice to determine the row and column of which stall you choose in the market, with the third die determining how many goods you get, depending on the capacity of the stall. Says Ornella, "The decision may be easy at the beginning of the game because all the stalls are 'empty', but because you cannot go back to the same stall later on, the market will be crowded later and will make the choice tricky. There are some die modifiers, but they are limited during the game and if not used are worth points, so it's a tricky decision to use or not."

Midgame image by Ornella

As for selling goods, Ornella notes that the combination of goods desired by a town is randomly generated by the website for each map, so while the game is print-and-play, you don't have a fixed PDF that you're printing each time you play — unless you want to, of course.