WAY back in the day – and by that I mean mid-to-late 1970s – when I was a wee lad, and handheld games weren’t a thing, a relative taught me a game that I could play by myself using just a pencil and paper (and maybe dice or some other means of generating a random outcome). The concept was that I was running a lemonade stand. That’s literally all I remember about it.
Does this ring a bell for anyone?
There was an old computer game about running a lemonade stand that came out in 1973 and later ported to the Apple II in 1979. The rules were pretty straightforward to the point you could easily transform it into a pencil and paper game with randomization of the overhead costs, the weather and the customers. These days the code is available open source so anyone could transform it.
So maybe back then someone knew how the stats and randomization was determined so they made a pencil and paper version of it.
That was my first thought, too, but you couldn’t really implement that game, as written, with paper and pencil. One of the randomly-generated variables is the overall demand level for lemonade, and one of the major aspects of gameplay is that the player starts off not knowing that, and has to determine it from how much is sold at various prices. You can do that in a computer game, which doesn’t have to show all of its internal calculations, but not when the player is doing the calculations themself.