The roll-and-write format has produced some genuinely excellent designs in the past five years. Ganz Schon Clever is a pure optimization puzzle on a single sheet of paper. Welcome To is the best flip-and-write. Railroad Ink is an elegant spatial puzzle. Pandemic: Hot Zone North America has a roll-and-write version.

The format has natural limits: it tends toward solitaire experience even when played multiplayer, the random element is often central rather than mitigated, and the disposability of the score sheets makes some players feel the format is throwaway rather than a proper game.

My recommendation for the format: try Ganz Schon Clever. It is cheap, plays quickly, and the optimization puzzle is sharper than most games in the category. If you like it, the whole roll-and-write genre becomes more interesting.