ScottVee Gaming

  Backpack Merge is a fun lightweight clicker that I installed last weekend.  You are a little Harry Potter dude and the object of the game is to merge items in your limited backpack space, expand that backpack space, merge more items, then auto-battle wave after wave of unnamed creatures at the top of the screen.  I got through the first few levels and found it amusing, though 20 waves of creatures is too much.   After a long run of successes, it suddenly got harder without warning and my backpack full of goodies no longer beat the baddies.  It turns out that you have to go to the equipment page and keep updating your items (click the item and then the tiny Info button, then Upgrade if you have the tokens to do so), so the power creep seems well balanced.  There are additional items and more slots that open as you level up.  You can swap items in and out of those slots to try them all. Somewhere, I have to unlock tier 5 items.  There are a lot of screens of shops and other stuff, and

I had not been on Empire & Puzzles for about 6-8 months, and popped on this weekend hoping to see a new Season 6 map.  I finished the big Season 5 Egypt map about a year ago, and after that they just added "Untold Tales" which is a disappointing and repetitive stack of over 100 fights with fish and sea creatures. This time, there were some extra splash screens pointing me to the new section of the game.  Dragonspire is essentially a whole new city/castle to build, a Stronghold and new kinds of buildings producing and storing new kinds of items.  This time it's dragon training, storage for eggs, fish and dragonstone, and the promise of more buildings unlocking as we level up the Stronghold.  There's a whole new Heroes screen where every character is either a dragon or a puffed-up dragonlike version of a normal animal.  I completed level 3 only to find that level 4 is Coming Soon.  There are new items, ascension items, training tomes and more to find, with bundles o

I tried a few new app games this week.  It's really hard to find the exact mix I'm looking for.  I am open to new twists or game mechanics, but they are rare.  Most apps run the same specials, the same boosters for the same 5 or 6 stats, the same contests and guilds and clickbait stores. One that I found was Hero Park.  It starts off saying, "This is the story of an old man and his unicorn," which I thought was cute and spunky.  In this game, you are building a town full of shops that craft items for adventurers, and you stock the dungeons where they can get loot and then spend the loot of beer and turkey legs in your tavern. When the unicorn zooms off to find new adventurers, it's hilarious.  Well, it was hilarious the first time, and now I just click that top-right button and the unicorn is usually off the bottom of the screen at the time.  The unicorn brings in new adventurers.  Four cards are shown at first, so choose the two with the most money who need the m

We picked up Skor at Barnes & Noble this weekend.  It looked like a simple piece placement game with enough variables to get interesting, and that's exactly what it turned out to be.  It can be played with 2 to 4 players.  We had two players as usual. There is a game board and a box full of big chunky discs representing shields, each with an outer (wood) color and a center (metal) color.  Each player in a 2-player game starts with four of these shields, and they each turn you place one on the board (see below for other rules).  You capture pieces by making combos of 3 or more of a kind, matching the outer color OR inner color on all three pieces.  After each turn, you grab discs from the box to bring your total back up to four. If that's all there was to it, it would just be a tic-tac-toe game with captures.  The outer and inner colors make it essentially two simultaneous tic-tac-toe games.  But there are two more rules: (1) you can put a shield on top of another shield if

We picked up a few games at Barnes & Noble today.  I went in there specifically to get the latest Scrabble Dictionary, because I have another blog where I specifically talk about word and word games, and sequences of words, and I wanted an easy way to note which words were Scrabble words, without having to type every word into a darn web search. Will Shortz is a puzzle legend, and his website and amazing profile can be found here . I remember way back when he was the editor of Games magazine, but his credits are as much fun to read as any set of game rules.  I wish I had accomplished one tenth of what he did in the realm of gaming. I grabbed this game because it sounded very simple, and it was as simple as it sounded.  Basically, as a two player game, each player draws 15 letter tiles from the box, and someone rolls the four big chunky dice.  The dice combos give the rules, and it's a race to see who can build the first two-word crossword solution to the rules shown on those di

Here is one of the games we got a Geppettos.  It's not really a game, it's a set of puzzles for one player to work out, but like Cat Crimes (the very first game I discussed on this blog ) we enjoy doing puzzles together.  It is clearly marked as "Puzzle Game for One Player," so that was fair. The puzzle is simple: you have to use every piece in the game to complete a valid path to get the dog to the human.  In the beginner puzzles, there are only two pieces for you to fill in, and you can get the hang of it quickly.  Each piece can only turn the path a certain direction, and there is one bridge piece where you can run a piece or path beneath it.  The medium difficulty puzzles leave 3 or 5 pieces open for the player to figure out.  The advanced puzzles show nothing but where the dog and human pieces go, and you have to figure out the entire set of pieces -- those are seriously difficult, and I'm not sure we completed one of those. I also had to wonder if the soluti