ScottVee Gaming

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...

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...

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:  

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...

I was running through my lists of old website logins last weekend, and eliminated a bunch where the sites had long-since disappeared.  I was surprised to see one of the old gaming sites (where I used to spend a lot of my pre-midnight hours) was still up and running.  As far as I could tell, nothing had changed, not the logo or layout or anything else I could recall from years ago. ItsYourTurn.com is a "turn based gaming" site, where you can play board games and card games with players all over the world by starting a game and then waiting for the other player(s) to take their turns.  When you log in, you will see the list of all games where it's your turn (thus the site name), and click through those turns, then either look for more games to start, or just go to bed. It was funny so see that I joined in 2004, played over 1000 games, and have not made a turn since Jan 2016.  Most sites will kick you off or disable your login if you don't stay active enough, but this ...

We finally got around to playing "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", the one we got on our Sedona trip on Halloween.  It felt a little off playing it in February, but we love all the Peanuts characters and the original shows, and Snoopy is still a go-to winner when we buy greeting cards for each other. Anyway, when I grabbed this, I thought it was the original for some reason.  One glance at the box should have been enough.  That swirly game board with paths crossing underneath other paths is distinctive.  This company did a similar re-issue for the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer game.  From what I remember, the original Great Pumpkin game had a fairly simple path around the board where player pick cards from the pile, and have to complete the four cards that make up one of the characters to win.  Those "four or six cards makes a bigger picture games" were not uncommon in the 1970s -- games like Colombo did the same thing. This is just a roll-and-move g...