ScottVee Gaming

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Botswana

May 25, 2026

Botswana was a birthday gift -- it seems like everyone in Anne's family figured out that we enjoy animal-based games. This one is a card game, and it's colorful and simple, but catchy. I can only talk about the two-player game, since we hardly ever get out to game with other people. The setup is simple: put the five batches of five animals on the table, set aside two cards, shuffle the rest and deal out all the cards. There's a scoring board with numbers running from 1 to 50, and each player gets a blank score token and another token with 50 on one side and 100 on the other side. The turns are simple: each player plays a card and takes an animal. The cards are numbered from 0 to 5 and are played vertically below the animal stacks. You can take any animal; it doesn't matter which card was played. When the sixth card is played for any animal, the round is over. Then, the top card (last card played) for each animal gives the point value of that ani...

Smokey Bears: Happy Camper

May 23, 2026

Sometimes, we will grab games for younger players because they have a youthful simplicity that we like. There's a whole younger player section at Barnes & Noble where we have found some curious and amusing games over the years, including Cat Crimes, the very first post we ever did here . We did a test run of Smokey Bears: Happy Camper today, and while the production and design is well done, with a whole 3-d camper you can build, the game itself has nothing to it. You choose an activity card which has icons of 7 items, then you find those 7 tokens, throw in 5 animals tokens and scramble them up. Put those face down on the board. From there you spin the stiff little spinner and move, and if you land on the compass you flip one or two tokens. Items go on your camper, animals go in the five "Animal Friend" spaces at the top of the board. If you get the 7 items first, you win. What's odd about this one is, it says it's cooperative bu...

Birthday: Games from Nowhere

May 23, 2026

So I had my 60th birthday, and a party was arranged ... and survived. Mostly gift cards for Barnes & Noble, which does have games. Here is the haul as of today: Botswana was a gift. Splendor was actually from work, from the weird Recognition program they have where you can send points to coworkers -- I had 110 points saved up which are worth about a buck each, and this was listed for 17 points and arrived the very next day. The rest were from B&N. It was really annoying that I didn't notice the Command of Nature one was just an expansion set to a game we don't own ... so that's useless, but it was $10 on the cheap table. The other two look good. Will test them out when we get a chance. I also made mental notes of some of the games that looked good, like Botany, and took some pics of what was on their discount table. Came home and watched some videos about those, and they just seem too complicated for our current lifestyle, or require d...

Cats & Boxes (Smart Games, 2022)

May 15, 2026

At the Julian Toy Chest, there were a few games in a series of "1 player puzzle games." I was able to pass up some of them, but how could I say no to Cats & Boxes with a cute cover like this? We don't normally do one player games, or games that are actually puzzles (not games). But the very first things I blogged here was Cat Crimes, which, while it was supposed to be multiple players taking turns doing puzzles, we just played all the puzzles together. And in this case, a fresh set of puzzle to play together sounded like fun. This one is very simple. There is a 5x5 game board, 5 cats, and 4 irregular tiles with empty boxes attached. The puzzle book has sixty puzzles ranging from simple to expert (like usual for these types of games). Here, the feel of the puzzles is unlike anything we have played before. Follow the layout of the puzzle in the puzzle book -- just setup the board as shown. Then you are given a minimum number of moves. Ea...

Game Hunting in Julian

May 15, 2026

I got a day of PTO for my birthday, so we drove up to Julian hoping the place wasn't so madly crowded on a Friday. It worked. We got there at about 10:30am and I don't think we saw even 50 people while we were there. We weren't planning on looking for games, but they do have a way of finding us. We always have to stop at the Toy Chest ... this time they had a few neat little games we had not seen before. And a copy of Shut the Box which I just blogged about last night. After lunch at the Miner's Diner (really good reuben and some cream cheese pickle balls), we went into the Old Julian Garage next door. The Garage is actually an eclectic gift shop full of mostly hot sauces and beer collector items. They have a lot of games, but mostly smart-aleck gags and drinking games involving puns and crude language. Still, we came home with these:

Shut the Box

May 14, 2026

Our local Ding Tea place had a new board game set up when we stopped by last weekend. Previously, they had a variety of Jenga games and those hook and ring games I wrote about a while back. This time it was Shut the Box, which I have seen before but never got to tinker with. It was a square game board where each side had little wooden pegs marked 1 to 10, all set up so you can flip them up or down. The game involves rolling the 2 dice and then flipping any combination of pegs that add up to the number rolled. You keep rolling until you can't flip another peg, and then score the sum of the unflipped pegs. Lowest scroes wins. Aside from a few tiny extra rules like only rolling one die if the highest remaining peg is 6 or less, that's it for rules. There was a nice big rulesheet printed and laminated, suggesting a few variations. If you manage to flip all the pegs ("shut the box"), you win that round immediately. I suppose you can keep a r...