ScottVee Gaming

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...

Sometimes, we will grab games for younger players because they have a youthful simplicity that we like.  There's a whole younger player section at Barnes & Noble where we have found some curious and amusing games over the years, including Cat Crimes, the very first post we ever did here .   We did a test run of Smokey Bears: Happy Camper today, and while the production and design is well done, with a whole 3-d camper you can build, the game itself has nothing to it.  You choose an activity card which has icons of 7 items, then you find those 7 tokens, throw in 5 animals tokens and scramble them up.  Put those face down on the board.  From there you spin the stiff little spinner and move, and if you land on the compass you flip one or two tokens.  Items go on your camper, animals go in the five "Animal Friend" spaces at the top of the board.  If you get the 7 items first, you win. What's odd about this one is, it says it's cooperative bu...

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...