ScottVee Gaming

Following up on the last article, the same day I found the 1972 British edition of Monopoly, I also grabbed what seemed like and oddity, called Make Your Own Opoly.  I never cared for all of those themed, skinned editions of Monopoly.  It was a bit amusing early on, but now every state and town has an edition of their own, every major TV show, movie editions, Star Wars, Simpsons, Las Vegas, Harry Potter ... argh.  Sometimes it's nice to see a store have a section labeled "Games" only to have it be just 20 or 30 funky clones of Monopoly, as if there was nothing else available in the world. So this one just struck me as odd. Early on in my programming career, about the first project I would do to learn a new language would be a few bits of D&D (of course) and then a simple board game, almost always Monopoly, because it was so universal and had a good variety of features (board, cards, money, properties) to write code for.  Back in the shareware days, I had a clone of my

This is going to be a tale of a very odd coincidence.  Anne & I have been watching the old Poirot series with David Suchet as the best Poirot ever.  The episode 'The Lost Mine" opened up with Poirot and Hastings playing Monopoly.  The story was meant to be set in 1935, and it felt a bit early, since the 75th anniversary of Monopoly felt to me like it was just a few years ago.  But in fact, Monopoly was first released on a large scale in late 1935.  And that 75th anniversary was so ten years ago. Then I noticed that the money was the "wrong" color.  So when it came up that Poirot won a beauty contest and collected "10 pounds", of course, it was the British edition.  Here it is: But was there already a British edition by 1935?  Turns out, yes, and instead of rushing to the internet to answer that, I found out in the strangest way. Three or four days later, while taking the dog for a quick walk around the block, some neighbors were throwing boxes of stuff

With the brand new 21w06a snapshot, part of the Caves & Cliffs Update, here is one of the biggest changes the Minecraft developers have made in years.  Check out the Y coordinate on this screenshot: Yup.  -12. They extended the full height of the world from the old 0 to 256 out to -64 to 320.  Their new vast caves can go as deep as -64, and after a lot of digging, this is my first glimpse of one of these deep worlds.  It looks a lot more impressive when youtubers like xisumavoid have Night Vision and fly through them on elytras.  It's actually pretty daunting on foot, with only so many torches.  But there are new blocks to see, new biomes to explore.  So far, I have only seen about 10 copper ores and 3 glow lichens along the way.  But after dinner, I head back to see what else is lurking. I don't care as much about raising the world height, since you can barely see the ground from up there, but when the new, taller mountains appear, then we'll see what that was meant to

Sometimes, the basic games are all we need to while away the hours.  Playing cards have been around since at least the 14th century.  There are so many great sites online that have galleries and museum exhibits of playing card history and design, like the International Playing Card Society, the French Playing Card Museum , and others. Hundreds of different card games can be found throughout history, some rising to popularity and sinking below the radar again, others remaining perennial favorites.  The thousands of card designs are fascinating, with their major regional variations and printing history, quirks and symbolism.  I actually find it sad that the standard Hoyle card designs have taken over and replaced so much of the world's creative variety, and that collecting playing cards has partly devolved into the designs on the back -- cars and bars and cities and animals and tourist traps -- instead of the actual symbols used to play the game. Anyway, for today, I just want to ch

What seemed like a pretty simple kids game from the 1600s to 1800s turned out to go so far down the rabbit hole, I can't even think where to begin.  The Game of the Goose was a simple roll-and-move game, generally a spiral with 63 spaces, ending in the middle.  If you land on a space with a goose, you roll again (or leap forward to the next goose), but there are other spaces along the way that send you forward or back, or swap spaces with other players, or sometimes pay a chip penalty, or simply die ... it's sounds like just another race game, right?  But you have to read the rules on each board very carefully; some are steeped in symbolism or strange morality plays, where the same layout is popularly used for tourism of countries or cities full of fine renditions of places to see. A lovely introduction can be found at tradgames.co.uk. You can search almost any major museum site, the Metropolitan , the Louvre, the British Museum , and all of them will have a cache of these game