1-5 Players
Designer: Rafael Lozano
Publisher: My Turn Games
Live (or re-live) the days of university in Rollin’ Campus. Using dice, live the Greek life, get a lousy job, try to live up to your family expectations, and maybe, just maybe, go get some study done. But is this an A+ effort or does it just flunk the rest?
How to Play
At the start of each turn, first thing is to activate your add-ons. These will give you free bumps on their respective tracks and additional moves if you assign dice to them.
Then the active player rolls the event dice and all the regular dice. The events affect everyone, adding some tracks, preventing others from being used or other various effects.
Then the active player will use a number of dice depending on the player count. Each dice is associated to one of six tracks: study, classroom, Greek life, student job, sports and, least but not less important, PARTY TIME.
Each track will move in different ways. Study and classroom are complementary to advance in classes, sorority / fraternity house will move up in groups, sport are a simple linear (well, spiral really) and so on. Moving up the tracks will also give you movement on other tracks. There are also three tracks that cannot be directly be assigned but move according to the others: money, family expectations and maturity.
After a certain number of turns, game ends. Each track gives you a number of points according to completion. There is also happiness and sadness tracks that are accounted, most points win.
Rules and Components
Rules are well organized and nicely illustrated. They are a bit sparse, leaving some areas unclear, but this is an early prototype and, as it appears with my interactions with the designer, they are quite keen on improving quickly.
The sheet itself is super duper busy. I mean, we have tracks and tracks and tracks. But, I appreciate how the iconography is clear and easy to distinguish, and I feel a big Hadrian’s Wall influence, which is always a compliment.
I would love to see this as a double sheet just to have bigger icons. That might be my old man’s eyes, but I prefer to have clearer glance. And, again, that might be a possibility in the future.
Gameplay
As I mentioned earlier, this takes great influence in big ping-pong-y comborific roll and writes and condenses it down to a 10-15 ordeal which, at least for me, the exact length it needed to be. Most games I end with that feeling that I wish I just had a turn or two more to squeeze in more points. That leaves you wanting to be even better next time.
I also quite enjoy how different the tracks feel. While I’m not totally sure about the balance as it is now, that is something that could be easily tweaked. But in my many games, be it as a nerdy hard working fellow or a party time jock, my scores have been all within a fine range.
Theme and Art
The way each track abstracts the experience with it is really smart. Some jobs earn more, but leave you unhappy, while working on the library pays nothing, but it does make you smarter. Being good at sports is tiresome, but makes you mature and your family proud. And you have to party either too little or so. much to become a legend. Anything else is just waste of time.
The sheet itself has a nice sloppy look, it does feel like college. The icons are a bit bland and generic, but then again they look very Microsoft Word-ish, which is entirely appropriate. That’s how I would put it: this looks, very thematically, as a college student was creating it.
And the reason why I say it is like this by design is because the rules are other materials related to the game are beautifully illustrated with very refined art.
Conclusion
Rollin’ Campus is a game with purposed contradiction: it is comborific but quick, smart but chaotic, tense but silly. It’s great game if you want something the offers the feel of intricate strategy but in a coffee break (or beer break more appropriately) timeframe. There are some refinements needed from now to release, but not that gets in the way of fun.
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