ScottVee Gaming

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...

I have posted a few times about playing Nonogram apps.  They are technically puzzles and not games, but check out these previous posts: this one from Nov 2020 , my post on completing Picross Survival , and my recent post about Nonogram Katana . Focusing on Nonogram Katana, they have over 100,000 puzzles submitted by users, suggesting that you can create your own puzzles.  About two years ago, I did one black & white puzzle with a pattern shaped like Florida, but since then we've been doing a lot more of the colored puzzles, so I thought it would be fun to try designing some of those.  The app is seamless when it comes to adding your own content: just go to My Nonograms, click + to add a new one, choose a size and color scheme, then you can use the palette to choose colors and use the controls you're already familiar with to fill out the pattern.  Here is a simple one of mine: It's just a basic spiral with four colors.  Once you save it, you can play it and s...

We found Escape from the Aquarium on the way home from our Sedona trip.   It looked cute and we didn't notice at the time that it was an escape room game for kids.   Or main issue with escape room games is that the pieces get marked up or ruined during the course of the game,  so it's hard to play them a second time.   And knowing the outcome spoils the replayability.  Escape room games are not really games, they are sets of puzzles. The art is bright and friendly.  The story is a bit silly: you get turned into a fish while visiting the aquarium and have to swim around looking for clues to get magical ingredients to get back to human form.   Okay. There is an answer book and hint book, both of them with scratch off spaces, so there's the main component that can't be restored to its unplayed state.  There are four folders full of clues but you have to dump all four folders together, since the stuff you need to solve puzzles in o...