ScottVee Gaming

It turns out that the Julian Hotel is also a gaming museum of sorts.  Who knew?  Their various parlors have shelves of games and puzzles, then drawers full of more of them.  A fine little treasure trove including items we've never seen before.  We just booked a few nights to get away from work on some much-needed PTO. The first table we sat at, waiting for our room to be ready, had Sorry Madagascar edition and an old wooden Shut the Box game.  The shelf behind us had two Scrabbles, Sentence Cube, Clue Silver Box, Julianopoly, "The Couples Game That's Actually Fun" (doubt it), Rummikub, Chess, Cranium and some jigsaw puzzles.  The other parlor had Old Maid (an old edition), Play Nine, Boggle, Misheard Music, Yahtzee, Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, I Wish I didn't Know, Classic Sorry, Clue, Sequence, Parcheesi Royal Edition, Dominos, Triominos, Boggle, The Ultimate Game for Couples, Othello, PayDay, Risk, Scattergories ... and two drawers of smaller deck games ...

Ever since I saw the cover to that Chihuahua-Opoly game , I thought the main dog would look good as a nonogram puzzle.  It turns out that it would take much higher resolution to capture the kind of detail needed for this, but I was able to build this similar image in 20x22 size.   It came out chunky, but still had enough character to hit Save and add it to my collection.  I called it "Chi pup".  You can solve this puzzle at Nonograms Katana . And here is Anne looking at the actual playthrough of the puzzle. It's not as cute as the one I did of Dory, but it's fun creating new things when I get the chance.  Yes, that's Dory passed out by her feet, dressed up as a pumpkin for Halloween week. ;-)

Well, this is just nuts.  I wanted a quick look at the art styles on some of these other games in the "100 Cozy Games" series.  Here's a tiny piece of "100 Marshmallow Cats". Yes, the art in this one is easier on the eyes.  Lower contrast, not just staring at a full-bright white screen.  I suppose I could turn down the screen brightness on these. The cats are not doing normal cat things in this series of games.  A cat sitting on a pillow would be too easy.  Instead, they take the place of leaves and petals and roof shingles or candles or whatever.  I added a white arrow to show one of them.  Heck, you can barely see the arrow at first, much less all the little eyeballs peering out from every surface. I'm trying to mentally figure out whether games like these would be fun to build, or maddening. The purist side of my brain will tell me these are not really games, but puzzles.  Right now, I'm just looking on Steam and Itch and finding a world o...

"100 Romantic Cats" was a fun little hidden items game we tried on Steam about 2 months back.  It's part of a whole series of "100 Cozy Games".  This series is out of control, just the games with cats have 100 Candy Cats, 100 Chernobyl Cats (not cute at all), 100 Blacksmith Cats, 100 Bakery Cats, 100 Italy Cats ... on and on with about 250 of these listed on Steam right now. Each level is a separate game ... or is each game a level? The pure black on glaring-white layout hurt my eyes after about 15 minutes, but we were mostly done by then.  The overall art and UI is cute.  There was fun music and plenty of different meows to discover.  I'm tempted to try one of the games with less high-contrast art, for my ongoing eye strain issues. On the funny side, it turns out that every cat you find actually has a name, and you cat see them all as little achievements on Steam. These games are currently $1.99 each with a variety of bundles, from 3 games for $8.37 or 9 of...

We get an hour or two each weekend to hop on the gaming PC at my house, and we mostly play Matt's Cats these days.   Here is Part One . Somehow, clicking all the things and seeing all the gags never gets tired.  There are quirky dialogs in between levels, unusual sound f/x, hidden cards with fan art, profiles of their fictional creatures, and bits from sketchbooks.  The devs really poured their hearts into this project. But we're getting close to the end at this point.  We didn't notice that the 12 worlds vaguely follow the months of the year until world 10 was full of Halloween and world 11 got extra snowy. Here are some of the sights and sounds.   There's a huge map that's an internet cafe from Hell (note, the chairs roll around), a ghastly green level where they ask you if it gave you a headache (yes!), seascapes, maze levels lit only by a spotlight effect, you never know what's coming next.  Seas of blood?  Volcanos?  Sure. The only ...

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...