ScottVee Gaming

We found a copy of Doodle Dice at a thrift shop in Black Canyon City.  It looked like it would be a Yahtzee style game but with shapes instead of numbers,  and that was exactly right. There was a bit of a twist though.  The box we got only had five dice when there should be six.  This was not much of a problem though.  Just take out the purple cards, the only patterns that use all six dice.  The game played just fine with five. Some of the patterns on the cards are really cute.  The game is just a matter of rolling and rerolling dice and trying to match one of the face up cards.  First player to score one of each color of card wins. The rules had some gaps, from the feel of it.  They said you can't have more than one card of the same color in your "hand", but many hands go by before the color you need comes up and I can't see not scoring some other  cards until then.  Maybe the game should end when a player gets all 5 (supposed to b...

On our trip back from Sedona to San Diego, we took some backroads to avoid crowds.  There's really no alternate route except Interstate 17, but there are some exits with small towns where unusual items might show up. We started off in Lake Montezuma.  There's a little shop next to the building that says Post Office (but hasn't been a post office in years), across from the Beaver Creek Inn.  I'm not sure it had a name, and there was such a frenzy of Halloween decoration we're not sure we'd recognize the place again.  But it said "Little Bit Of This, Little Bit of That, New $ Thrift Store" out front.  There was a surprising variety of things here, from games to books, plush animals, 3-for-$1 stickers, cards and more.  The game section caught my eye with 3 different editions of Fluxx.  There were some funny spawns of Cards Against Humanity, including Kids Aginst Maturity and Stoners Against Sanity, plus a range of small card games.  We grabbed Gloom ...

We were at the Ranger Station at the Crane Petroglyph Site near Montezuma's Well (yeah, we end up in the darndest places) and we saw this on one of the tables: While more of a kid's activity sheet than a game, it's actually a very clever merging of a nature quiz and a maze.  For each question, the two answers have arrows pointing to two separate paths.  All the wrong answers point back to the "Are You Sure?" box in the center, but there is only so much space on one sheet of paper. A neat little diversion.  I wonder what deeper versions could be constructed, or whether any attempt will get too cluttered to be usable. Footnote: Montezuma's Well was closed due to the government shutdown.

We covered the Tlaquepaque area yesterday.  Today we spent a lot of time driving and walking the main roads and back corners of Sedona.  Of course we came here for the great outdoors, but every time we tried to get near a trail it was a clog of No Parking signs, No Hiking signs, so I guess you can only get to those landmarks by shuttle these days. There were some games to be found in town, just not together in any one place. The local Goodwill had only one board game that was out of the ordinary, and it was Buffalo in a Box, a Monopoly clone for Buffalo NY that somehow ended up in Sedona -- I didn't see the name of the company that made this, but it was not one of the usual Opoly knock-offs.  Did not buy. The library book store had lots of jigsaw puzzles but no games. We did find one very unusual game at the Twice Nice Thriftique, for the Verde Valley Sanctuary, a charity for battered women in the area.  We also saw a donation table for them at a local supermarket....

We were on vacation in the Sedona area, so we went over to the Tlaquepaque Shopping complex where Google marked a toy shop for us.  Right away, we were slapped in the face with how insanely expensive most things were in these shops.  $8000 metal sculptures, $1000 paintings, $30 salads and appetizers.  No point even walking into the jewelry shops.  We're both at the point in life where we don't want "things" anymore.  So, the buildings were gorgeous, and the whole structure was a mind-blowing fun maze of little passages and narrow stairways.  But we stopped going into the shops because they made us feel poor and unwanted. We did stop at the Tlaquepaque Toy Shop on the second floor and it was like a small piece of our world, an oasis in the sea of unattainable things.  They had about 20 small board games, mostly games we already owned, like Set and What's the Point, but it was more about toys and science kits than board games.  They had an entertain...

There was a street fair in town on Sunday,  and though we almost never see a product we want or need anymore, one table had a little game console with 700 retro arcade games installed.   I couldn't say no to having a treasury of games like that at my fingertips. It was easy to set up.  It turns out that about half of these were Japanese editions that I would not be able to read,  though there would be some surreal element to not knowing what is being said. Still,  that left a few hundred,  including classics like Defender, Galaga, Ghostbusters, Arkanoid, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Panzer Attack, and others.  Scrolling through a list of hundreds of items is tedious. It is really odd looking back now, how these games had so little memory or file space.  It's amazing they could deliver so much content with so few resources.  These days,  for a simple game, we'd probably pack a dozen mp3 tracks for music, but each of those files is 1...