What are 'And Write' games?

Written by Emma Garrett

In the gaming world, we talk about replayability, often citing how chess has infinite replayability despite always starting in exactly the same way and having no trendy expansions. I feel like what I’m calling “And Write” games are a bit like this. Everyone starts with the same blank page in front of them, and then the journey each player takes branches off in different directions. It’s no wonder there are a multitude of transport-themed And Write games. To play, you might turn over cards, or roll dice, or have some kind of random element, and you’ll record what you want to (or are able to) do on your player sheet. 

You’ll often find in And Write games that there is limited player interaction. Each player is seeing the same information, but the gameplay is just on the paper in front of you. It’s wonderfully satisfying in allowing you to come up with the best plays, but it’s unlikely to give you a riotous, memorable gaming experience with a group of friends.  

Let’s get some warnings out there. Hoarders beware, you’ll want to create a scrapbook for all the completed games. Nerds beware, you’ll want to snap a picture of them and attach it to the entry for that play in your chosen play counter app. Upgraders, you’ll have that wipe-clean board and non-permanent marker pen premium version saved in your basket for only so long before succumbing to the temptation to click “buy”. It’s so shiny, and think of the environmental savings. 

Paradoxically, for games that are almost entirely self-contained, flip and writes can have ridiculous player counts. Welcome To, for example, says you could play with 100. Presumably, the pad of scoring sheets has 100 pages. It would be an almost entirely silent affair, as everyone stared at the projector screen showing flipped cards blown up the size of doorways. I suppose Bingo and Beetle Drive were the OG And Writes, and they found their ways to encourage interaction. Maybe in 50 years the retirement homes will be filled with games of Welcome To and Next Station: London. 

And Write Games

Cartographers

A lovely little game in which you get to fill a map with different terrains that are flipped over each turn including forest, river, farmland and goblins. Each season has different goals regarding the size and shape of various terrains and what they are adjacent to, so you’ll build one map, but score differently each round. To combat the player interaction deficit of And Writes, the goblins are placed on an opponent’s page, in a mirthless attempt to thwart their goals. Goals are universal and in black and white, meaning you can be perfectly precise in your attack. 

Ganz Schon Clever (That’s Pretty Clever!)

A roll and write. The archetypal roll and write that shows precisely what you can do with a piece of paper, some coloured dice and a black marker. The lure of this game is the combos you can string together to mean that by choosing one dice you can pinball one effect to smash into another, compounding the chain reaction until you’ve made five dice worth of marks on your page. I’m not so clever, yet (but you could be twice as clever!). 

Buy Ganz Schon Clever on Amazon

Welcome to…

The premise of this flip-and-write is simple: fill the doors on the streets with numbers. Lower numbers have to come before higher numbers - laterally, that is, you can play them chronologically in any order - and try to tick as many point-scoring boxes as possible. The myriad of scoring options is amazing, and it’s hard to balance getting something from every one of them, with the lure of aiming towards the dizzyingly high numbers it’s possible to score on if focusing on just one aspect pays off.

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