Roll Estate

Roll Estate is a dice-rolling game by Chris Richaud which can be found a Print-and-Play over at PNPArcade for just $3.  There are some extra posts and ideas on BoardGameGeek, including a brief interview with the creator.

It's a buffed-up Yahtzee game, which is fun because we all know Yahtzee, so you start with a foot forward, AND many of us would like to think of ways to expand Yahtzee or give it a more concrete meaning.  Well, Roll Estate frames the die rolls in terms of buying real estate and making investments.

I have played it a few times in the black and white version, as shown.  The color PDF is quite vibrant,  and the graphics add a lot of character, but my old core printer was very slow and frank ink like crazy. 

The sheet looks complicated, but there are the usual 1's to 6's and 3-of-a-kind and 4-of-a-kind at the top in the Real Estate section, with the other familiar rolls down below in the Investment section.  Up top, you essentially get to score three of each type of roll (two for 1s and 2s) with the extra catch that they have to be in ascending order from left to right, so if you already scored 8, blank and 16 for 4s. you can only score a 12 in that middle slot.

To the right of the scoring slots are the Business slots, which you get by completing the row.  So, as soon as you score three scores in the 3s row, you get to check off the business IF you're the first player to complete the row.  Well, with more than two players, some rows have a half bonus for being the second player to complete the objective.  You then score each row using the numbers at the tops of the boxes, so for the 4s row, if you got the 1st player bonus, it would be $25 + $25 + $25 + $65 for $140 total; the second players would get $50 instead of $65 for $125 total.

Below the line are your investments, where you can score straights (1-4, 2-5, 3-6 or Any) with the trick that each straight can only be score by one player, after which no other player can score it.  Below that is the stock portfolio, which is the same as the Chance box in Yahtzee, just add up the 5 dice.  A neat twist here is that you get two checkboxes for the straights of five ("large straights"), and the final score for that row depends on how many straights you got.  Below that is the 5-of-a-kind box for 150 points.

The 3+ players game ends when a player scores their third business, for 2 players it's the fourth business that ends the game, and there is a solo game where you have to try and score them all without being unable to score any row.

There are some more details, but the rules are short and sweet, and make sense the first time around.  The score sheets come in color or black-and-white PDFs as well as economy versions with two sheets per page.

We tried it with two players, and I hit a 5-of-a-kind in my solo test game for a $525 score.  For the solo game, I'm not thrilled with having to score every row with no fails; it feels more natural to just do your best, maybe cross off a few boxes, and find a better way to rank the success at the end.  Maybe failed rows score zero, and you could rank your top and bottom scores.  I think the perfect top score is 1330; you could subtract the failed boxes from your investment score, in which case I failed on a $30 and a $75 so my final score would be down to $420.

There are a lot of solo roll-and-write dice games in the print-and-play arena, and this one would be on the simple end of the spectrum.  It's fun with two, having a few more things to think about than Yahtzee, without being overwhelming.