ScottVee Gaming

After getting completely bogged down by Dog Lover  yesterday, we really needed a game where the cards aren't covered in rules and buffs and debuffs.  On some Facebook post yesterday, someone asked about whether some cat game (Calico?) was good or not, and one of the responses was to try Cat Between Us as it was super quick and awesome.  Something like that.  Thing is, we bought Cat Between Us a few months back, and when I read through the rules at the time, it seemed disappointingly complex like every other modern game we try. Then we watched Rodney at Watch It Played .  He described it so well, we could almost throw out the rules and just enjoy the game.  Look!  Each card just has a number.  No extra rules or exceptions or special powers in little tiny fonts.  A cat worth 2 points is a cat worth 2 points.  And it is beautifully simple while being just different enough that we had some figuring out to do.  All the little ...

I was excited when I saw that the makers of Cat Lady put out a game for dog lovers.  I got it using recognition points at work. I really looked forward to having it show up on my front step, then showing it to Anne, then setting it up and getting into it. Except ... it took all the annoying little details we did not like about Cat Lady and multiplied them into a crazy matrix of on-card gobbledygook. It added a new column of cards to represent "Tricks", which are actually patterns of which cards you can pick from the 3x3 grid at the heart of the game.  In Cat Lady, you just pick a row or column of 3 (except for the row or column marked with the cat token), then move the cat token to mark that column so the next players can't pull the same row or column.  In Dog Lover, the explanation of the Trick cards was weak, so we spent most of the game arguing every time about whether you can shift the dog up or down one, and which cards you could actually take. I think the actual rul...

We stopped at a community garage sale in San Marcos (CA) this morning, in a big string of apartment complexes off the train tracks.  They posted a flyer on Facebook last friday, and it said "Toys & Games", so I screenshotted it.  That has become the easiest way to remember stuff these days.  On the weekends, we can look at all the stuff I clipped and see if any events are worth doing. Driving by, it looked like just piles of clothes, but there was a little indoor community area, super hot and sweaty and crowded, with a couch piled high with games.  Most of them, we had already seen, or they were in the party game category we don't care for.  We picked up these items for a whopping $4.  So I finally have a Catan -- I kept skipping that one due to the dexterity  issue of trying to line up the little bits along those borders, not sure if Anne will want to do that.  But we have one we can tuck away for some future day. Those two little games were ...

I'm serious.  I sat down and (sort of) played a round of checkers with (sort of) Batman. This thing is a sculpture attached to a bench behind the main housing towers at Cal State San Marcos. First, he tried to tell me what piece to move, because he's a big bossy jerk. Then he tried to intimidate with this chilling stare. So I pretended to move this piece instead. Then I figured we should hit the road before he accused me of cheating.

Anne usually plays Canasta with some ladies in the mobile home park on Tuesdays.  Or if one can't make it, they end up playing dominos, Mexican Train. So, while I was having trouble sleeping and looked at one of my shelves and saw the box for "Random Fun Generator" by Steve Jackson Games, I vaguely remembered there was one in there that used dice as dominos. That game is Hexican Train.  Each player gets eight 6-sided dice, and two dice are used as the starting pattern.  Then, each turn, try to put two dice together into a "domino" and play it at the start or end of the line of dice.  If you can't play, pass your turn.  If both players pass, the hand is over: score one point for each die left in your hand. Add up the scores, and when a player reaches 10 points, the low score wins. It's quick and easy, and the worst I got was six dice left over after she played about four 4s in a row.  But we finished each set only 2 or 4 points apart. It might work for mo...

That's just a great title.  "The Most Tabletop Games per Square Centimeter by Andrew J. Young.  You can find this one-sheet game on itch.io .  It is priced at $5, which one could argue is crazy for one sheet of words, but there are ten ideas here that you can take and run with, and have an improv good time.  It was last updated on 5 Jun 2023. It does manage to fit 10 games on one sheet of paper.  The creator could have cheated by using incredibly small fonts, but these are all a reasonably readable size.  The challenge about discussing this is, if I quote even one sentence from any of these games, I will have given away a significant portion of the work.  I certainly can't post a screenshot, because that's all there is. Actually, there are more than ten ideas here.  The games themselves are a fun mix of themes and genres, where you can be animals or halflings or programs or regular joes, battling zombies or robots or the time cops.  Or r...