Roll & Write games are one of the hot genres in the tabletop industry at the moment. The granddaddy of the style is, of course, YATZEE.
One of the primary advantages of theses games is their accessibility and general ease of play and low learning curve. They usually play very quickly and can some are playable by an infinite number of people - theoretically. This makes them easily implementable via Zoom or other streaming formats. COVID quarantines probably only fueled their popularity.
A couple areas within this genre that are not yet well-explored are cooperative and legacy/campaign roll & writes. I believe Cartographers has a campaign version and Escape Roll & Write is an example of cooperative play. My plan is to add Living Starship to both categories.
I've done a couple different variations of Living Starship Academy as a roll & write, the instruction video for one even placed in one of Board Game Geek's game design contests. I also made a R&W game themed after the drag king and queen personalities of my drag troupe - Haus Alnite.
The downside to implementing R&W for Living Starship is that extending the mechanism over a campaign risks it becoming repetitive and uninspiring when done too many times. The trick will be keeping the simple formula fresh over subsequent chapters of the game without letting it become bloated with complexity so as to be unrecognizable at the end.
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