Games that can be played with only pencil and paper:

• Battleship was played as a pencil and paper game, long before Hasbro came out with a board game version.
• Dots and boxes
• Exquisite corpse (surrealist game)
• Hangman
• Hex
• Gomoku
• Mastermind
• Paper Soccer
• Race Game Use one or more pens to race
• Racetrack or Vector rally
• The Shannon switching game
• Sprouts
• Tic-tac-toe also known as noughts and crosses

These are all games in which pieces stay put once you place them.

Tabletop role-playing games are sometimes called pencil and paper role-playing games. This qualifier is used to distinguish them from live-action role-playing games and computer role-playing games.