ScottVee Gaming

Following up on the last post, I also got Skip Bo from burning some "recognition points" at work.  Skip Bo Junior has long been a favorite of ours -- a simple, catchy game with cartoon bugs on the cards.  I have long wondered what made it "Junior".  If that's junior, what did the original game look like? At first, the original Skip Bo felt weird to us, but then it felt so familiar we had to stop and think what the differences actually were.  Mainly, in Skip Bo, you get a stock of cards (30 each for 2 players, but we went with 20 for a shorter run), a hand of five cards, and four potential discard piles, and the goal is to get all of your stock pile onto the four build piles at the middle of the table. But that's also exactly what you do in Skip Bo Junior.  But is it?  In Junior, you divide the deck evenly after dealing the Stock piles to each player.  Then we take turns dealing one card onto each of the other player's discard piles, but that was our o...

As a follow-up to all those "Card Golf" games a few posts ago , I was trying to spend "recognition points" at work and saw the Play Nine actual card game come up, and I had to have it as a follow-up. It is exactly what we expected, an 8-card version of 6-card golf with custom cards.  The cards are numbered properly so you don't have to remember that queens are 11 or whatever.  The art is a perfect fit, with cartoon golf balls, and the 0-point card is a Mulligan. The differences from the core Card Golf rules I posted previously: 1. You deal out two rows of four cards and flip two 2. You cannot just draw a card and discard it, if you do you still have to flip one of your face-down cards to face-up 3. the scoring has vertical pairs still count as zero, but two pairs are -10, three for -15 and 4 for -20.  A pair of -5s counts -20, two pairs of -5s counts -30. And it gives you an official score pad with a little golf pencil for scoring. The game runs quickly, no surp...

We went up to the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim yesterday, on a last-minute "why not?" mission.  As always, I had terribly anxiety on I-5 driving up there, but we made it from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. before the heat and endless walking wore us out.  We did finally find the gaming room where there was a library of hundreds of games, and maybe 10 people at four tables players having a good time. As a quiet place to relax, it was perfect.  The first few games we took out turned out to have a minimum of 3 players, so, um, whatever.  Then I brought over "Here, Kitty Kitty!" and it was a winner.  Easy to learn, with friendly art and some good visual gags on the cards. You start by choosing a house tile with three spaces (Yard, Porch and House), and you dump the 40 plastic cats into the space between the houses, a.k.a. the "Neighborhood". Each turn, you get two actions out of 1. move a cat one space, 2. play a card, 3. discard up to 3 cards and draw ...

The is a cute one-page jam game I found on itch.io.  It can be printed on a single sheet of paper and folded into a little 8-page booklet that would fit into a regular deck of cards.  I have seen a few of these now, and they are both cute and clever.  The creator's playthrough video is here . Meow.  We sat down and played it on Saturday, ironically just a few hours after taking my cat Mango to the vet. Since all the rules had to fit on one sheet of paper, it wouldn't be expected to be hugely elaborate.  Instead, these games give such clever basic frameworks, you can imagine scenarios and expansions in your mind's eye.  Here, you make a basic character with a name and four d6 stats, and this character is going to wander around town looking for cats to rescue. Roll dice to pick a few odd items that you can maybe roleplay into the game.  Then roll 2d6 to see which part of town you're visiting and another 2d6 to see what you're doing in that part of town....

I was exploring more games on itch.io and came across the most amazing bundle ... their Games for Scholarships bundle offers 324 games for $10 or pay what you want.  I paid $40.  I was going to do a wacky number like $43.21 but it only takes $5 increments.   These are mostly small games, and entries into one-page or one-day design contests, but still, I will gladly give them $2-$3 individually, so this is unbeatable.  I look for the ones with strange topics and quirky humor.  Things I have not seen so many times before.  And boy are there some unique things in here. I will quote their main pitch here: "Funds raised will provide scholarships for underserved youth participating in the Games for Change Student Challenge, a global game design competition that invites students ages 10-25 to create original digital and tabletop games about issues impacting their communities." I have already read PDFs for 4NC13ENTS, The Uninvited Guest, Finals (an arcane co...

We figured it would be good to look at all those apps for Card Golf games to see what the "core rules" really are.  A developer isn't going to spend so much of their time just to code some weird, unpopular, unknown variation.  There is definitely a pattern. There are 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10 cards layouts.  We could just as easily deal out 12 like in Skyjo. Every app asks each player to flip two cards face up to start the game.  A few start with a peek at the bottom row of cards.  The ones with the peek are more likely to be memory games where you don't expose cards until you finally go out at the end.  That is not a play style we enjoy, so we moved along. The default scoring is: Ace = 1, 2-10 = face value, J & Q = 10, K = 0.  Jokers are -2 if included.  If not, score the twos as -2 instead.  Vertical pairs or triples (in the 9-card version) cancel out and score 0. The game flows better when you can discard without revealing one of your face-dow...