ScottVee Gaming

  Wrapping up my series of gaming superlatives, we've come to the largest user base in gaming history and probably they biggest modder community as well.  And if those could somehow be argued, it has at least been, hands down, the best bang for the buck of my life.  Good ol', Minecraft.    It was about $20 back in 2007, still in beta, and 13 years later, they're working on 1.17. Here is my home page for my Minecraft ventures over the years.  I have played or tested nearly 1,000 mods over the years, and built and released a few modpacks of my own.  I was doing Minecraft videos (let's plays and tutorials) in the version 1.4 to 1.7 days; it was fun taking imaginary viewers on my expeditions with me, riffing comedy skits with the zombies, but ultimately YouTube got flooded with so many super-high resolution videos and live streams that my equipment just couldn't keep up. I have about 10 massive modded worlds now, which I cycle through, a few months playing one universe

No series of articles about my personal experiences with games would be complete without Dungeons & Dragons.  It would even fit into my series of smallest and oldest board games as probably the biggest game in history, by almost any measure.  Number of players times the number of books or number of pages?  Influence of the game?  Pick a measure, this game spans half a century now, with easily 100,000 pages of rule books and campaign settings and reference guides; it has the largest multiverse of any game or written series that I can think of, where every pantheon from human history can coexist in an eminently logical way; it has inspired more competing game systems and spin-offs than anything else I can think of.  It more-or-less created the modern RPG genre, evolving from a one book add-on for a table-top wargaming system - the leap that Gary Gygax made was "hey, what if we stop thinking about each piece representing an army, and think about individual characters?"  It w

Here is a magical crafting card game with a unique prop: the market itself is made up of 6 little vials of colored powder on a sloped rack. The card trading is pretty simple, just a few basic actions to get, buy or swap to acquire the ingredients you need.  You can trade in ingredients for coins in sets of 2, 3 or 4, whichever number is on the cards.  Or you can trade ingredients for one of the potions that are showing.  The potions let you get more ingredients, or bonus coins, or even get paid a few coins to steal a card from another player.  The way the market works is that when you sell ingredients, you move the colored vial for that ingredient back up to the top, and the others roll down, sending their prices up.  Or there is a Supply Shift card with a blurb that's fun to read, which will cycle all vials until the selected color is at the lowest point on the slope, the highest price. I tried to work out a solitaire version after our first few test runs.  I tend to fiddle with t

  One of my favorite basic card games as a kid was Mille Bornes, a simple car race simulation deck.  There are mileage cards (25, 50, 75, 100, 200), Stop and Go lights, Speed Limit cards, and then a fun combination of obstacles you can throw on your opponents to slow them down.  These are: Accident (negated by a Repair card), Out of Gas (cured by an Extra Gas card),  and a Flat Tire (fixed with a Spare Tire card).  There are also special immunity ("safety") cards, one for each obstacle. It's a simple game of throwing down mileage and trying to screw up the other players.  I always just draw a little race track, it's easier than trying to keep stacks of numbers sorted out; it's essentially a graphic display of our progress, and it's more fun to look at than a stack of numbers.  In the official rules, you are supposed to need a Go card to get started or after removing any obstacle, but we always drop that rule.  Life is just too short to wait for Go cards. Techn

Death on the Cards (an obvious play on the "Death on the Nile" mystery by Agatha Christie) is a good game of trying to catch a murderer with a deck of cards.  Each player has a few Secret cards which they keep face down, and one player starts with the Secret that says they are the murderer.  Now, with just two players it's a bit anticlimactic since we always know who the killer is, but the card play is interesting enough to make up for this, and we can picture how it would play with more people. Anyway, the players all try to get the murderer to turn over the Secret card which exposes them, while the murderer tries to stay in the game until the last card is drawn because, cleverly, the very last card in the deck says Murderer Escapes.  There are some action cards to move cards from the deck to the discard pile (to get closer to the bottom) or from the discard pile back onto the deck (Delay the Murderer's Escape).  Otherwise, you mostly play sets of investigator cards

Patolli is a cross-shaped game of the "race around the board" variety, from Central America, possibly as far back as 200 BC.  It is also the center of a century-long dispute about whether a game from the new world, which is very very similar to Parchisi (from India) could have been independently invented, or obviously borrowed.  In this case, the trouble is that the early reports are from the early 1600s, from Spanish conquerors who were not necessarily reliable observers.  There are really only three possible answers: - Yes, the New World game was borrowed from some Old World source, but rather than proving some highly unlikely link between cultures, maybe a single missionary brought it over and it caught on much later than the stories would have us believe. - No, there was no borrowing, it was a purely local invention.  Sure, both games toss 4 or 5 binary objects (beans for Patolli and cowrie shells for Parchisi).  Yes, both boards are cross-shaped, but it's not like no

Another ancient board game, Puluc (also known as Bul or Boolik) is from Mesoamerica.  There are interesting debates about its exact origin, and whether or not it predates the Spanish conquest of the region.  It is a simple game, just a track with nine spaces, but it is a relaxing little challenge that does get tactical at times. The best sources for information are the usual suspects: BoardGameGeek , Cyningstan, a4games and an overview from Wikipedia . The basic board looks like this (my quick version): But, in keeping with the endless creativity of game board makers, there are versions with 10 spaces, up to 25 have been reported, and the Wikipedia image shows a board designed in a circular pattern. The basic rules are: 1. Setup 5 red pieces in the red zone ("city"), and 5 blue pieces in the blue zone. 2. Each turn, throw the 4 two-sided casting sticks to see how many spaces you can move.  If no sticks land face-up, that counts as 5 spaces. 3. move any one piece the number

 I'm sure that most Westerners, who grew up on chess and checkers and coloring books, and are told to always stay within the lines, will think of Tic Tac Toe when I mention a 3x3 board game.  Sure, if you want to stay inside the boxes, that's what a 3x3 grid looks like. But many games are played on the lines, not on the boxes.  So here is a basic 3x3 grid.    If you are still seeing a 2x2 grid, let me show where the pieces would go.   What makes this easily-drawn board so neat and compact, is that the lines show how and where the pieces can move. Technically, that simple board is used in a game called (not surprisingly) Nine Holes .  The basic rules for all games on this page: - each player gets three pieces, the pieces start off the board - take turns adding pieces to the board - once all pieces are on the board players can move one piece one square each turn.   - Winner is the first to get three in a row. It's not the most exciting thing, but you can sketch the board anyt