ScottVee Gaming

After a two-day trip to Temecula found no worthwhile games in any thrift shops, and no game shops in the area, we hit a jackpot on the way back from a haircut in Vista today.  The Goodwill shops in Temecula had hardly any games of any kind, and a disgruntled guy explained how they "sell everything good on their website these days," but the Goodwill in Vista says otherwise. We found Chickapig (which looked like a strategic piece-moving game), Shut the Box (because we've mentioned it a few times recently), a rudimentary molecule model kit (my house feels oddly empty without one ... once every few years) and the Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game! (which qualifies as a WTF find). Then we went to Pair-a-Dice games again, because the Leggs gave me a gift certificate at my birthday party.  Of course I overdid it.  Gift certificate times 5.  These days, one of the challenges in shopping for games is trying not to buy something that's just an expansion you can't use.  There ...

We finally got to play Diced Veggies at a hotel room.  Sadly, while the preview photos of the room showed a long desk, there was only one chair, so there was no comfortable place to try a new game. Boy, this does not work on a bed.  The main gimmick is to set up the 35 dice in the square frame and trim off some dice with the cardboard cleaver.   You start with two recipe cards and a booster card.  Basically, each turn you try to carve out some dice you need from the grid of dice and match the colors to the colors in one of your recipe cards.  If you can match the numbers or sums on a booster card, you score those points too.  As I recall, at the end of a turn there is a max of two recipe cards, two booster card, and 8 dice that you can keep.  The rest have to be discarded.  The dice go back into the rectangular frame.  And when you complete a recipe, those dice also go back into the grid.  Each card scores around 4-5 points. Each pl...

This is a card game version of Boop, which we reviewed here . We had vague recollections that the original Boop was cute but confusing.  It was hard to visualize the moves when each cat or kitten played booped the tiles around it. Boop Shuffle perfectly catches that same confusing feel in a tiny deck of cards.  It is still for two players only.  There are two little rolled up strips that you can put down at right angles to represent the edges of a 6x6 game board.  The original Boop was much better in this respect, with the cute "turn the box into a bed" motif. Here, you still try to get three kittens/cats in a row to promote the kittens to cats, thought it's done in an obtuse way by putting the promoted cats into the discard pile.  So they will be available the next time the discard pile is shuffled into a new draw pile.  It was a bit disappointing just drawing a card and playing it, even if it's the other player's cat. There are a few variant cats, and one...

A few more quick finds: We stopped at B&N last weekend with some leftover birthday gift cards and found a few small games that looked like they were worth trying.  We also made mental notes on a few larger games, only to watch videos and find they were way more complex than we wanted.  I'm not going to stand there in the store and look for reasons not to buy, or pester them with second-hand tales of sales from halfway around the country.  If I can't remember the game by the time I get home, then it didn't make much of an impression. These days, to trigger the "buy" impulse, a game needs to sound like it has a quick setup, only a few pages of rules, and hopefully some new game mechanic that hasn't been done to death, although cute cats and dogs will score big points. Anyway, we found Boop Shuffle and Diced Veggie.  Boop Shuffle was obviously a card game version of Boop, which we already reviewed and found both cute and perplexing. Diced Veggies boasted a ga...

We ran two rounds of Splendor this weekend.  I had watched a gameplay video the night before , so I had a good idea of how it would play out. But when we finally set it up and started playing, we found that the available choices were a lot trickier than I thought they would be. The setup is as shown here ... it's a 5x4 grid with five patron tiles at the top, then there are blue, yellow, and green decks where you place the deck face down on the left and turn four cards face up next to that.  There are the five types of heavy gem chips and a stack of gold chips ... these all feel like the heaviest poker chips we have ever tried to pick up.  Nice solid pieces and colorful artwork Game play sounds simple.  There are only a few options: - take one each of three different gems - take two of one color gem if there are at least four gems left in that pile - buy a card for the gem cost shown - stash a card in your hand by taking a card and a gold token That last option felt...

Botswana was a birthday gift -- it seems like everyone in Anne's family figured out that we enjoy animal-based games.  This one is a card game, and it's colorful and simple, but catchy. I can only talk about the two-player game, since we hardly ever get out to game with other people.  The setup is simple: put the five batches of five animals on the table, set aside two cards, shuffle the rest and deal out all the cards.  There's a scoring board with numbers running from 1 to 50, and each player gets a blank score token and another token with 50 on one side and 100 on the other side. The turns are simple: each player plays a card and takes an animal.  The cards are numbered from 0 to 5 and are played vertically below the animal stacks.  You can take any animal; it doesn't matter which card was played.  When the sixth card is played for any animal, the round is over.  Then, the top card (last card played) for each animal gives the point value of that ani...