One of the go-to examples in design circles of mechanics that are outdated or should be avoided is roll and move. However, a recent discussion has gotten me thinking about it, and as always, that means it’s time to write an article about it!

A Brief Description

Roll and move is one of the oldest mechanics in the world, and has been used many times over. The oldest game known, Ur, is commonly believed to use the mechanic. For those who need a summary of what I’ll be talking about, roll and move is commonly agreed to mean a mechanic where dice are rolled in order to determine how far a player’s character can move. All of those things can be changed slightly and still probably count. Sometimes cards can be used instead of dice, or some other form of randomization. Sometimes you aren’t necessarily moving a character on a board, but gaining action points, or determining range. The base of it, though, is that you are using something random to determine how much a player progresses. Sort of. We’ll get into that later.

Rolling Dice

The first half of roll and move is rolling. Rolling dice is a surprisingly divisive element of board gaming. A lot of people consider dice as emblematic of the entire hobby, but some designers avoid them like the plague. Randomness is fun but scary. The risks and flaws of randomness in games have been long documented, so that’s not really something I want to talk about too much here, I just want to point out that anyone who has a problem with randomness will invariably have a problem with roll and move. Some people don’t have a problem with randomness but do have a problem with roll and move, and that’s far more interesting to me.

Moving What?

The second half of roll and move is the word move, and that’s a little more vague than it sounds. The physical component is the clearest definition of it. Literally moving a piece is a move. But that usually doesn’t count things like moving a resource to your player board, or moving cards down a line to fill spaces. It usually has a thematic tie to movement, usually of a character. Even this, though is often abstracted. Why does your clue character need to be in a certain room to make a guess about that room? Is your character in Monopoly actually moving to a new location when they move?

I think a main thing that separates movement from not-movement is direction. If you are “moving,” then you are heading up, down, left, right, or what have you. There’s usually some grid or line you have to move through, with different spaces to land on. That is what counts as movement for the sake of roll and move.

Movement is not Universal

When you move a piece, what happens? You move a piece from one spaot to another, but what does that do to the game? If you move a piece 6 spaces or 3, what’s the difference? If the difference is just “3 is less than 6,” then your game shouldn’t have roll and move. If two 3’s nets you the same result as one 6, then all you’re doing is making luck part of something with no other impact. If you game is about traveling to a specific destination, then of course just rolling higher will be better. There’s no strategy or choice, just some result being better than others.

If we look at how randomization is best used, then we can think about how roll and move can be best used. Think about Monopoly. When you roll dice, what are you doing? You are determining which space you land on. But all of the spaces do something! If you land on your opponent’s space, you owe them money, if you land on a new property, you can buy it, and so on. The “movement” is more or less irrelevant. If it weren’t for the income on the Go space, there might be no reason to want to move forward at all! It is effectively the same as drawing from a deck, just that the results are weighted.

Choice

One of the big words that gets thrown around when talking about roll and move is choice. When you roll dice, choice is taken from you, which is not fun. Again, this is mostly an argument about randomization in games, but I find it often leads to players learning the wrong lesson. For example, a game with roll and move, but where you get to choose which direction to move in. The feels like it’s giving the players more choice, but it doesn’t really affect their options. A 3 is still worse than a 6. If there’s a good space 6 spaces away and a good space 3 spaces away, you can only reach one of them with a 3 but could reach either with a 6. If you force players to move exactly according to their roll, then you are just removing the choice that you’re attempting to grant them. Roll and move, just like any other form of randomization, should be used to add variety and force players into different options, not make something better or worse outside of their control.

Conclusion

Roll and move has a lot of baggage attached to it, but the primary things you should take away from this is to not use it if it doesn’t need to be there. Ask yourself if moving the same amount each turn, or using some resource to decide movement would make for a batter game. It very well might.