ScottVee Gaming

After playing "My Shelfie" a few times, I thought it would be fun to show an actual shelfie of our game collection.  We don't have whole rooms to devote to this.  We have limited space, and have no interest in keep every game we get.  Sometimes, they're just not our cup of tea and we happily donate them to gamers we know, or local groups who can probably get them to players. Our main, active game area is this two shelf spread at Anne's place.   There are more games behind the one we put in front, but it feels more peaceful to have the few boxes up front.  We tend to put out cat and animal games there.  So you get to see a small selection of cats instead of a whole mess of little boxes and card decks of different sizes.  We don't typically play battle games or big box modern Euro games.  We like them small, short & sweet.  The binder has a bunch of printable roll-and-score games ("Roll Estate" and such) and notes of mine on classic ga...

We wanted to check out a few more games this weekend, but I was down for most of Sunday with a nasty headache behind my eyeballs.  Probably the usual eye strain, but how do you rest your eyes when there are so many things to do?  So many things that need to be done ... I did recover enough after dinner to try a few games of My Selfie with Anne.  Like usual, I read the rules once or twice in the days before playing, and look for online video playthroughs if it looks at all complex.  This one looked like a simple Yahtzee-style dice-matching game, and I was not wrong. Note: I saw at least one other completely different version of this game where you actually place tiles onto shelves.  The version we got is the dice version.  It had the quickest setup time we've seen in ages.  The box has just these things: 6 dice, 4 score cards, 4 dry-erase pens, and a tiny rulebook. Each turn, you roll the 6 dice and try to match up to the sets you can score.  You c...

I am sure I played Ticket to Ride a few times over the years, probably with Doug or the Leggs, since I have no real contact with any other gamers.  We picked up a copy at Walmart a few weeks back and finally had a chance to unbox it and give it a shot. First we watched this "How To Play" video from WatchItPlayed.  I like his explanations -- they are always direct and easy to follow. It turns out the game really is as simple as his explanation.  Each player starts with 45 train pieces, 5 trains cards, and pick up to three of the top three ticket cards to select which rail routes you will attempt to complete. Each turn, either pick additional train cards, or additional train cards, or spend train cards to complete one section of track.  The feel of the game changes as the board fills up.  At first, every route is wide open, but halfway through, there are routes that block any attempt to get from one city to another.  Also, when selecting ticket cards (paths ...

Here's one of the games we picked up at On Board Gaming last weekend.  Since we're often looking for goats & sheep in our Minecraft worlds (Animania mod), Mountain Goats caught my eye.  We have so many cat and dog themed games.  None with goats until now.  But yeah, most of our collection has animals of one type or another. Right away, I was a bit surprised at how big the mountain tiles were, compared to the picture on the box.  We could probably fit a dozen goat meeples on each tile.  The setup was easy, and the rules were easy.  Place the mountain tiles as shown, then roll the four dice, combine them into sets of numbers and use those sets to move your goats up the mountains. If your goat gets to the top of a mountain, you get the matching score chip, and you get to kick any other player's goats back down to the bottom of the hill.  If you roll a 6 and your goat is already king of that mountain, you just stay on top and take another score ch...

We had some time today in between making new copies of house keys and taking Mango the Cat to the vet, and halfway between A and B was On Board Gaming .  So we stopped by to see what was new. There was a big Magic: the Gathering game going on, filling two long tables.  And a few other people were milling around.   We were amused by how many cat-themed games had appeared on the shelves compared to our last visit.  We saw Boop the Halls -- see my blog post about that series .  There was a new Cat Fluxx game -- how did it take them 20 years to think up a cat-fancy version of that one?  About eight other other cat games caught our eyes (House of Cats, etc), but most looked to be more complex or full of tiny parts than what we enjoy playing.  Not counting the Exploding Kittens or Kittens in a Blender -- what is WRONG with those people?  That's not funny. We saw a board game tie-in to the recent animated film Flow, which, if you're an animal lover ...

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 ...