ScottVee Gaming

In a  previous post,  I talked about how much we enjoyed the mini-zine-game Cat Distribution System by Jessika Rocha.  It ended by saying we were going to start drafting up some rules for the "Adoption Center" expansion that was in my head. Since then, it has gone through a few revisions and is in its final draft.  I contacted Jessika, creator of the original CDS game, and she said she liked it and it would be okay for us to upload it to Itch as an official expansion. Here is a shot of our last round of playtesting on Sunday...   I ended up designing a 3-page PDF of optional Player Sheets.  You can print these out to help you track and organize your cat rescues and adoptions.  The photo shows page one of our rules, plus the original CDS (black-and-white print) and the Player Sheets in action.  I found that I like to write development notes for our game projects as they are being worked on.  I think it adds a little value telling the extr...

This is an odd one we found at a community sale a few weeks ago.  Quads looked interesting, but it started annoying us right away.  After seeing what was in the box, we could never get it to fit back in the box again.  Tonight, we tried to play it, but the rules on the back of the box were so tiny, I couldn't read them even with my reading glasses on.  Yeah, they packed about 10 languages on there and made them all unreadable.  Then, when I did get a photo using the phone and zoomed in until it WAS readable, it was full of typos and translation fails, and still managed to sound incomplete. We tried to play the game using those fragments of rules, and yeah ... if they had used four actual colors, it would have been a no-brainer.  We could have started making moves with some confidence and sense of exploration.  But instead, they went with Black, Gray, White Ribbed Vertically and White Ribbed Horizontally, and Anne never did catch on to the ribbed patter...

We found this one at a community rummage sale.  Yeah, we're tired of Monopoly games, but Chihuahua-Opoly was too cute to leave behind.  Oddly, it was not produced by the usual Opoly companies but by a company called Late For the Sky, out of Ohio. The game itself is cute.  The choice of game pieces was odd, since none of them were dogs.  The whole idea that you are renting dogs and can mortgage dogs when you need money ... well that's screwy.  Most Opoly games run into the same issues when the theme changes drastically but there are no matching actions that make sense.  Here, the railroads were four temperments.  Weird.  The Chance and Community Chest cards were now Good Dog and Bad Dog cards but some of the choices were questionable, like getting fleas being in the Good Dog pile. Once you realize it's going to be this kind of surreal experience, it's fun.  More fun than regular Monopoly since you can't take this one too seriously.  Free ...

We released our first print-and-play little RPG/simulator game on itch.io.  With "Therapy Dog Goes to the Con" you can roll up encounters with people at a sci-fi convention, where they can interact with your friendly little service dog -- we're sure the pup will make everyone feel better.  You can find the game here . Background story:   We have been working on this one for a few weeks now.  After years of taking a small service dog (Dory) with us everywhere and seeing how often she brightens the day for people, we realized there were patterns.  And as someone who enjoys making up random tables for RPGs that may or may exist, this was a good challenge for me. We tried dozens of print-and-play mini RPGs on Itch, and it felt like this game would fits a niche on the site.  Sure, there are journaling games and games full of d6 tables, and games about dogs, but this one has all of those things along with some real-world good feel.  Then, while on a trip to ...

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...