ScottVee Gaming

I bought this game for Anne because of the cute & famous dog.  It's clearly another Game of the Goose (see my blog post on those) variant where you race to the center of a round board with 64 spaces, with some spaces to send you forward or back.  In the older Goose games, the effects of the special spaces would all be listed on the game board in little tiny text.  It is so much better to draw cards when landing on these, like the Benji game does.  The obvious benefit is that you get different results each time you play. We found a gap in the rules within the first few minutes.  The rules say that when you land on the angry dog you go back to the start, and when you land on "any other picture" space, draw a card.  It feels like they meant "any other photo", because there are other pictures -- bone, heart and food -- which just feel different, and the way they clump up near the end of the track makes drawing cards too chaotic.  Those other picture spaces feel

I have been looking at reviews and descriptions of a lot of board games that were tie-ins to TV shows from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and most of them are so generic they're hardly worth mentioning. A more quirky game is the Happy Days game from 1976.  Here is the BoardGameGeek page .  And here are the guys at Board Game Archaeology covering it.  But I want to head back to the Javascript board games page over here , since I couldn't find anyone doing an actual playthrough. The JavascriptBoardGame team has done another nice clean implementation.   Sure, you roll the dice and move around the board, but there are some twists that make it fun to play.  First of all, the overall goal is to get 16 Cool Points -- these are scored by moving your peg around the jukebox at top right.  You have a few dollars to spend along the way.  One fun spaces is "Hey Nerd" where Fonzie calls you a nerd, so you lose a cool point.  On the "Sumthin' To Do" spaces and "Cruisin&

Here's a game that doesn't fall into any of the categories I talked about last time.  Just when I thought I had worked out a good set of labels to help split all the subtopics.  While I have no interest at all in golf, I always got a kick out of miniature golf.  Just don't take it so seriously ... get some fresh air, putt the ball around, and enjoy yourself. For us, half the fun of miniature golf is the meta-game of people watching.  See how many different ways other people approach the same problems.  See parents showing their kids a thing they enjoy, and how some kids love it, some kids cheat every chance they get, and there's always a kid who gives up by Hole 12 and has a tantrum.  Then there are the young couples on dates, sometimes just laughing and being supportive, sometimes more competitive and mean to each other and you wonder why they're even together.  We also saw two groups of three or four men: one group who were screwing with each other, cussing at eac

Here's a game that's as old as I am.  I don't remember the Milton the Monster show, but like almost every TV show from the past half century, it has a board game.  It's not easy to find, but there's a website that finds these old games and makes them playable online with Javascript.  The site is here . This team does good work.  The game is not that exciting, just a roll and move race game.  But the developers made the spinner spinnable, and added a few sound effects for fun, especially the little sound gag when you win the game. The somewhat interesting elements of this game are: you are playing two discs, and when you land on an opponent you send the opponent backwards to the closest white space, so you can force them to lose a turn or whatever. So until you get one piece to the end, you get to choose which piece to move to avoid the bad spaces.  To win, you have to get both discs to the final space by exact count.  Once one piece is at the final space, the game g

Odds are, some of my readers only want to see posts about board games and others are more interested in the phone app games.  I rarely get out to actual arcades, but when I do, those games are just as much a part of game history as any of the others.  So I sometimes include those.  Here is an odd little niche game that's not really a game at all: the coin push arcade games. These are huge on YouTube.  You can find thousands of videos of people filming every minute of the "action".  There are fun moments but the rest is like watching paint dry.  It's not a game where you get to make choices other than when to hit the button.  All of the arcade games these days are essentially just pasttimes that convert the credit on a game card into "tickets" on the card, but I like the meta-game of finding the games where I get the most minutes of entertainment for those credits. There are a lot of different types of coin push games.  The one shown here is themed with Angry

We stopped at the Mulligan Fun Center in Temecula CA on the way home from our trip.  We enjoy just about every kind of game, and how games cross our lives in other ways.  So stopping at a family fun center and trying out all the games is just another kind of gaming.  About the only kind of gaming we DON'T do is casino gaming or gambling. Skee-Ball is a favorite, because it is so simple.  Just roll the bowl up the ramp to where it jumps and has various targets to land in.  I don't really care about the score, or how many tickets come out.  It's just fun hitting a few of the better holes. Some years ago, a kind of virtual bowling game started appearing in these fun centers.  The one we show here is called "Lane Master".  I like the smoothness of the transition from real-world to on-screen balls.  Really, you are just rolling a ball a short distance, and it falls into a groove and comes back, but the screen detects where the ball hits and puts the video ball at that