The Rooftops of Ludovia

The Rooftops of Ludovia is a 3-6 player "print and play" boardgame from Loodo, a Brazilian site devoted to games. "Print and play" means it's free -- the PDF contains all the components you need to play other than a die and some playing pieces you can easily steal from other games -- but that there's some time (and printer ink) involved in assembling a playable set.

Graphically, it's a nicely put together game. And it's not bad from a "beer and pretzels" aesthetic: quick playing (a half hour or less, unless you have players badly susceptible to analysis paralysis), and kind of entertaining. The premise is that the players are thieves, robbing the houses of a rich urban neighborhood; police patrol the streets, moving in a semi-random fashion, and the player who gets to $1500 worth of stolen goods first, delivering it to their lair, wins. Of course, the police can capture you, which then involves losing some turns in prison; thieves can also try to steal from each other, or knock each other off rooftops into cop-visible streets. And there's amusing equipment you can buy from the "black markets," including fishing poles (increases your chance of stealing from another thief), disguises, and so on.

There is a modest degree of strategy involved, in terms of avoiding police and locating un-ransacked houses while others are knocking them over; ultimately, however, the game's flaw is that it is too chance dependent. What you find when you enter a house is a matter of random card distribution, and bad luck with police movement can injure you badly. Thus, victory will at least as often be determined by luck as by strategy.

Still, it's cute, and I can easily see playing this game with kids, or with the somewhat inebriated.