ScottVee Gaming

Here is an item I was happy to finally get my hands on.  There were a lot of household products in the 70s and 80s that had some elaborate activity packs or games for kids.  This is a pack "Compliments of Chef Boyardee" with a scene of dinosaurs on the outside.  I'm not sure if you had to send in coupons or labels to get this, but it was a surprisingly elaborate set of die-cut designs. Unpacking this was a lot of fun.  And don't worry, I got a second one that I can keep untouched.  But games and toys are meant to be played with.  So we had fun punching out the dinosaur scene.  It had two vertical folds, so it was meant to stand up and be the backdrop for whatever scenes we felt like staging with the cardboard dinosaurs.   There were two cardboard dice that you punch out and fold, and with very clever use of tabs and slots, they held together well. I wouldn't expect any world-class deep strategy game in a kid's activity pack, but the game was ...

Here was a strange sequence of bored gaming ... Last night we were testing out some new apps on my new big screen tablet, and found a collection of two-player games that had a version of Ludo among other things.  Oddly, it ended when the a player got their first piece to the middle.  That was odd, we were each moving a bunch of pieces and had no idea that was going to happen.  I figure they were trying to keep things short. Today, we dusted off that old "100 Classic Games" box because I knew there was a ludo board in there.  We played a game where again the first piece to reach the middle was the win, and it stripped the whole flow of the game.  We each just got onr or two pieces out and raced for it. So we tried it again the classic way, where you have to get all four pieces to the middle, and that's how I remembered the game was supposed to feel.  Camp a piece or two right behind the other player's escape space.  Keep pieces tailing the other player...

Yes, there is a game celebrating the old Honeymooners TV show with Ralph & Alice, Norton & Trixie.  Reading the back cover description on an eBay listing, it sounded kooky and different, so I went for it.  A few days later, there it was. One little note: the pieces and cards were still sealed in plastic bags, and the game pieces (all different colors of Ralph) were oddly greasy or slimy, even after a quick rinse.  Whatever plastic they used did not age well, so we used dice as our pawns, like so many other times. It's a roll and move game where you have to visit all 4 corners of the board to get a bonus card from each of those piles.  Nothing fancy there.  What sounded like fun was how the main flow of the game was driven by character lines and punch lines. If you land on a space that says "Ralph's line" or any other character's line, play one of those cards if you have it.  Read it out loud, of course.  For each of those, there a matching punc...

We were moving games from one stash to another this weekend, and Mummy Math came back to the surface.  We got this on a trip up north in 2023 . This is from Learning Resources .  This is from Learning Resources. It has no copyright date, but my guess would put it around 1995.  Their web site is still around and they have come a long way since these old plain cardboard box days, but this particular game is not listed. It wasn't going take much time to test it out.  It's like a set of flash cards for addition and subtraction, with one or two actual game elements.  Cute, though. Each player gets a board with a pyramid with a red triangle at top, and they choose a red triangle tile from the box to go in that top space.  The rules said orange, but the actual tiles were 90% red. After that, the goal is to fill each row of the pyramid with an equation that adds up to your top number.  Each players starts with 7 number tiles and can use any yellow "plus o...

We tested out the Mah Jongg Card Game we got at the toy shop in Julian last weekend. Like always, I will read through the rule book once or twice before actually trying to explain rules to Anne.  This one has several layers of complexity, but the basic game is just an extended version of Rummy.  There are all the suits and objects you would expect to find on Mah Jongg tiles, but with English captions for some of them, like the flowers and seasons. Basically, for the two player game, you deal 13 cards to each player and the dealer turns up a card on the discard pile.  That's not exactly what the rules say, but it has the equivalent result.  Technically, we're supposed to pass a card to the player on our left before the first draw.  Details, details. From there, the goal is to go out by getting three four-of-a-kinds and a pair then announcing "Mah Jongg!" and laying them down.  There are only a few other rules in the base game.  If you can use the top di...

Minecraft Explorers was a fun find at Walmart.  We almost never go there, but our George Foreman Grill broke and after some mean not-so-lean ground turkey spit grease all over Anne, we had to go find a new one.  While we were there, we found the game.   I trust titles by Ravensberger though they do tend to have a step more complexity than we prefer.  When I looked it over at home, I wasn't expected the huge two-sided rule sheet.  That sheet was printed separately in 6 languages so we chuckled the ones that were not EN.  The cards had so many icons and numbers I worried that Anne would just be annoyed by it . I ended up watching a solo walk-through which helped make sense of that double-sided page of rules.  I was able to explain it and we got through the games. I'm not sure how useful a brief explanation will be.   Watch the video.  Overall, the layout has a row of chest cards,  a row for monster cards, two rows for biome card...