ScottVee Gaming

After my last post about the oldest known board game artifact, it might be fun to describe the smallest board games in history.  You might think of Tic-Tac-Toe right away, but that has nine whole spaces to play on.  The smallest I could find was a Chinese games called Pong Hau K'i, which has only these five spaces: Player one starts with pieces on 1 and 4, player two puts their pieces on 2 and 5, and the winner is the one who can blockade their opponent.  It is just a minor exercise, and a game should either end quickly or go on forever.  Over at Cyningstan , this game is also called Horseshoe. A similar game from Korea, called Umul Gonu uses the same board (though in a more circular shape) but Player A starts on 1 and 2, player B on 4 and 5, and the obvious one-move win of 2-3 is forbidden. From here we can move on to a 7-space board: For a game called Madelinette, player A starts on 1, 3 and 6; player B starts on 2, 5 and 7, and it is another blockade game.  T...

The oldest known board game dates back to about 2500 BC from the city of Ur in Sumeria.  Wikipedia has a good overview of it.  BoardGameGeek , like always, has a good range of versions and information.  And one of the finest pages on the topic is over at A4 Games . One of my favorite videos about this game is the elder Irving Finkel or the Royal Museum, discoverer/creator of the rule set we know of, playing YouTuber Tom Scott over here .  It's from a few years ago, but I remembered getting a kick out of it back then, and seeing it again just now: it is something to watch grown men enjoying their little competition so much.  And all because of this simple thing from 4500 years ago: What I want to talk about is the fascination of this artifact, the mystery of its symbols.  Different sets have been found from tombs all the way down to King Tut and the early Christian Era.  A tablet of rules was found dating from 155 BC, written in cuneiform, which descri...

I played many fun sessions of Risk over the years.   There is something deeply enjoyable about getting together and putting little troops on a map, and trying to outmaneuver each other.  Of course, there is also that epic, grinding sense of doom and failure when the forces start to close in around you ... and the in-person game might still drag on for another hour while your world dwindles to nothing.  At least with the software versions, you can rage quit if you need to. ;-) Each group of gamers probably had some of their own house rules.  There were a few different "Nuke" rules: in one case a roll of 6-6 would draw the top card off the deck and nuke the territory shown, marked on the map with a penny, and all troops on that space were halved. In Games magazine (Oct 1981) there was a Risk-style game called Ozymandia , by R. Wayne Schmittberger, who went on to write one of my favorite gaming books: New Rules for Classic Games, Wiley & Sons, 1992.  I pla...

Sometimes, the super simple kids games are the most fun. Maybe they are not worth analyzing, maybe they are. But here we go. Sorry! is an odd game. At first look, there is nothing to it. And yeah, behind the scenes there is nothing to it either. But when I sat down to play a session just now, to get some images for this little set of articles, THIS happened: It's like the game knew I was going to write about it, so it handed me a big negative 4. "Here, you can start off by NOT going anywhere."    On the funny side, after Anne and I picked up this copy of Sorry! about a year ago, for the first few months we didn't notice that the 4 actually says move Back 4. Not Ahead 4. Umm, shouldn't the four be a different color to maybe make it stand out from the forward-moving crowd?  Okay, negative four did make the game slightly more variable. And at a dinner a few months later, Doug let us know that the slides let you knock out ALL the players along the slide - eve...

Yahtzee is certainly one of the most widely known classic dice games in the world.  I'm sure we have all spent many hours enjoying it.  Yet it is just one of a group of other games where you roll five dice and score some combination of them. The full history is covered pretty well on the Wikipedia page .  Yahtzee dates from the mid 1950s.  Before that, there was a well-known parlor game known as Yacht, with pretty much the same rules.  About the only things Yahtzee added were the top section bonus, three of a kind, and the small straight. I put together a table of the different rolls, names and scores among some of the better known games in the Yacht family. Pattern Yacht name Yacht score Yahtzee Name Yahtzee Score Generala Name Generala Score Yatzy Name Yatzy Score Cheerio Name Cheerio Score Hooligans Name Hooligans Score Ones Ones sum of the 1s Aces sum of the 1s Ones sum of the 1s Ones sum of the 1s One...

Nonogram.com Nonogram Katana Two Eyes Nonogram   I actually never heard of "nonogram" puzzles until I ran into the Nonogram Adventure app in the Android Play store about six months ago.  The idea is to mark the boxes on the grid using the numbers around the edges.  Quite addictive, really.  So, after being a kid who played every little strategy puzzle I could find, and managing to go my whole life without falling into sudoku, I found myself hooked on this instead.  Sure. After working through a few hundred of those puzzles, I found other Nonogram apps, each with its own pros and cons.   Nonogram.com: a good basic apps, puzzles up to 15x15, black and white only.  They have a daily challenge, and about twice a month they put up a series of about 40-100 puzzles with two to seven days to score a trophy of some kind for solving them all.  You get three tries per puzzle, after which you have to "Buy More Lives" but they don't cost anything. Nonogr...

  Qwixx is a colored dice game from Gamewright, just six dice and a score pad. You can check it out here , even read the full rules.  Basically, there are two white dice and four colored dice, which match up with the four colored rows of numbers on the score cards.  The flow is that on each turn, the next player throws the dice.  All players get a chance to score the two white dice.  Then the player who rolled gets to score a combination of any white die and any one colored die.  So, everyone gets the white 2+4=6, then the active player can try to score an extra box of maybe white 6 plus blue 4 to get the blue 10.  The non-active players don't HAVE to score anything, but the rolling player must score one number on their turn or take a 5-point penalty box.  The genius of the colored scoring rows is that the top two rows go from 2 up to 12, and the bottom two rows go from 12 down to 2.  If they all went from 2 to 12, you would just alwa...

Dig is a fun little game of doggies digging bones out in the yard.  It is one of a series of tiny games -- each half the size of a normal deck of cards -- from Pack-O-Game .  They are surprisingly interesting games for their size.  Basically, for Dig, you put all the tiny cards in one long row.  Then you each play a dog who gets up to 3 actions per turn: Move, Dig or Drop. It has a cute feel to it overall.  Just grab bones, drop them in the matching colored bowls, and have fun. But there is some strategy here, since the final scoring is based on the order in which the dog bowls end up.  Each time you dig a bone, you can replace it with a bone of your own, put it back, or keep it, cycling the very end card into its position.  So the order of the bowls will change as the game goes on. We find that the bowls usually scramble up without really trying, but it's possible to focus and move right next to the doghouse when the bowl I want is at the end of the ...

 CAT CRIMES was an unexpected surprise that we found in the kid section at Barnes & Noble.  It turned out not to be a head-to-head game but a series of logic puzzles to sort out with the cute little props provided. The rules say to take turns and read the clues to each other and keep track of who solved more cases, but it turned out we both had more fun solving the puzzles together.  The cards range from Beginner to Expert difficulty.  The clues get increasingly more cryptic as the difficulty goes up.  A beginner clue might be "Ginger is seated next to Tom Cat", while an expert clue might be "No cat with blue eyes is seated next to a claw mark" ... there are two cats with blue eyes, two claw marks ... but there always does end up being one solution that fits all the clues.  Flip the card and see if you figured out which cat did the deed.  The Expert ones are seriously tricky.   The fact that there are two seats at each side of the cat tab...

Welcome, I have always been a gamer and game history enthusiast.  Aside from the endless board games and card games as a kid, I got into Dungeons and Dragons around 1982 (age 16), and GM'd games all the way through college.  Boy we had some adventures and memorable moments that we could talk about for years to come.  But it wasn't all RPGs ... when I knew there was some odd game going on at the sci-fi club or the local game shops, I would pop in to see what new rules and game mechanics the designers were coming up with.  I recall some epic sessions of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, the fascination of maps of real places, well-researched scenarios, hundreds of little unit chips, resolving whole lines of attrition battles, armor breakthroughs, trying to hold the beachheads.  Or just playing 500 Rummy with my Mom.  It's all good.  ;-) By the 1990s, free time became scarce for me and video games had largely replaced the in-person game sessions. ...