EDITOR's NOTE: The Meeple Guild is providing additional reviews over this holiday week, so check back daily for new game reviews.
YORKTON - So you want a little role playing fun but your gaming group can’t get together – well a Print & Play, Roll & Write game such as Void Halls might fit the bill.
This is a very straight forward effort in terms of printing, it’s one page and in this case black and white works fine – meaning full colour would not enhance things very much.
In Void Halls you are a wizard organizing your dungeon – setting out treasures to lure heroes, and then setting traps, and sending out warriors to encounter them.
You will need to collect nine D6 dice, something most gamers will have piles of, and a pencil and you are set to go. You could slip in a plastic page sheet and use a dry erase marker too.
From there this feels a lot like Yahtzee in the sense you roll the dice, up to three times on a turn, trying to achieve pairs, three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind etc,. Each of the successful rolls gives the player something in the game—access to additional dice (up to nine) being perhaps the most useful.
The game plays over 30 rounds, so you will be rolling lots of dice.
You want to roll lots of dice for obvious reasons. You are rarely getting a straight run of five dice rolling only five. The odds improve if you can roll nine.
But, the game gets tricky because there are things you will want to do within the game where you have to give up a dice to do it.
The things you can do are laid out on the single game page but some aspects are worded to be a little difficult to easily comprehend. Slow down, read again and it tends to become clear, but you may find some initial frustration.
Early in the game you really need to think whether giving up a die is worth it.
There are just rarely enough dice to do everything you want. Void Halls is very much about resource management and the key resource are those pesky dice that even when you have a mitt full might not roll up the numbers you desperately need.
Along the way in this game from designer Kalogeratos Gerasimos you earn points. And at game’s end you gain added points for things such as how many dungeon levels developed, upgrades made, and building built. The higher you score the better you feel.
You can play again in an attempt to better your score although this feels a bit like a one and done, kill some time with a low cost PnP, enjoy the experience, but don’t expect too much with Void Halls.
