ScottVee Gaming

Collapsi is a neat little quick card game from 2025 created and presented by Mark Ball on the Riffle, Shuffle and Roll channel. It only takes a few minutes to figure out, as there are only a few rules.  It's played on a 4x4 grid of regular playing cards (four aces, four 2s, four 3s, two 4s and two jacks).  You move pieces on top of the cards, with each of the players starting on one of the jacks.  On each turn, you move a number of moves equal to the value of the card you start on, with those starting jacks counting as one.  You can wrap around the rows or columns. After you move, you flip ("collapse") the card you started on.  You cannot move through a collapsed card or land on it.  The only other rules are: you can move through a card with an opponent piece on it but cannot land on an occupied card; you can change direction during your move; but you can't land on any card more than once during your move.  The last player who makes a valid move is th...

Chickapig looked cute when I bought it, but it sat on the shelf for a while because it also looked a bit dopey.  So, when we finally sat down to play we figured what the heck, it could be fun.  And fun it was. It's an abstract game where you try to get your little animals across the board.  There are chickapigs, hay bales, and a cow that poops when it moves.  Haybales can only move one space orthagonally, but your chickapigs can move in a straight line until they hit an obstacle.  They cannot stop halfway.  You roll a die to see how many moved you get, and you can choose any combination of pieces to move ... so you can smack into another piece then change direction, shoot all the way across the board and bonk into something else. If you roll a one, you have to move the cow instead.  In this case, you can move it to any other space, but it leaves a poop behind.  If you roll a two, you can either make two moves or take a card you can use now or late...

We took a crack at Looting Atlantis today, and really could not get into it.  On the box it sounded like  you place lava tokens and grab cards before the city burns down.  In actual practice, putting those 4 cards on every board space took up a lot more room than expected, and then the rules missed a lot of situations. Even how to place a lava token was not described well.  It was either "on the next space in a lane" or "moving out across city spaces" or you could start a new lava lane.  This could have been described as simply "on a space with a red triangle or next to any space that already has lava on it." We didn't see the note that for two players, you should place two lava tokens at the start of each turn, then take your two moves.  Or the note that after the lava hits a city space, you take three moves per turn for the rest of the game. We saw that the cards had special scoring rules and effects written on them, but they were a bit hard to read....

Anne's family had another gathering, and while we were still waiting for people to get there, I noticed the game Skyjo sitting on top of the usual stack of games.  I didn't think about it until after pizza, when a cousin said she found this neat new game on a trip to Guatemala.  The same Skyjo that we discovered a few weeks ago.  That was an odd coincidence, stumbling on the same game just a few weeks apart but in different countries.  Anyway, I covered Skyjo here , when we played it with just two. One of the players said it reminded her of Nine Cards Down, which we covered here  . The main difference was that Skyjo has simple numeric Uno-style cards one a 3x4 grid where Nine Cards Down uses regular playing cards in a 3x3 grid.  But yes, there were similarities. Since we could not get away before the gaming broke out, we ended up playing Skyjo with 7 players.  In my mind I wondered how much table space you would need for the full 8 players listed on th...

Butterfly Garden is a gorgeous hexagonal tile placing game.  I grabbed it because it reminded me a bit of Tsuro , but with a nature theme.  The game designed was Reiner Knizia, a name that sounded familiar ... I turns out he also created Botswana, which we reviewed recently . Among hexagonal tile placement path-building games, for simplicity Tsuro would win every time.  But there is a lot of room for variety.  In Butterfly Garden, the players have sections at the edge of the board marked as their "flower beds", and there are six fountain tiles around the edges that each start with one blue butterfly, and one tile in the middle where the remaining six butterflies start with the purple one flying last. As you place tiles, you try to guide butterflies to you own flower bed, then score them by placing them behind your player screen.  The blue butterflies count as one point each, pink scores two and the solos purpler butterfly scores 3. After the first few moves, the...

At our regular boba place, one of the owners brought in yet another odd game for customers to play with.  This one looked vaguely familiar but had no markings at all, no brand or name.  The lady who brought it in said she didn't remember what it was, either.  The place was busy and there wasn't a chance to ask more about it. It was a wooden box with a grid of holes on all four upright sides and about twenty plastic sticks pushed through those holes.  With the sticks in place, it left room for five or six wooden balls at the top.  Clearly, the goal is to either bring balls to the bottom or prevent the same. I was able to find the same exact game on Amazon and Temu, but with such generic names that they are clearly knock-offs of something else.  They were called things like Ballfall and Montessori Drop Game.  I do not link to sites that are full of knock-off games. Now, if you Google the phrase "game with balls and sticks poked through holes" the top con...