ScottVee Gaming

We did a test drive of a new card/word game this weekend, this time it was WordSpiel.  The basic idea is that you have to play a word using the last one, two or three letters of the last word played.  It started off easily: The rules show the words building into a perfect spiral around the draw pile, but, well, that's never going to happen.  What a pain... The first thing we decided was to reset the spread of played cards when it started to get too ragged.  Really, the game is so simple, there is no grand strategy, so we don't need to know every card that was ever played. There, nice and tidy.  Goodbye, impossibly neat spiral.  Anyway, it was an enjoyable way to burn through some cards on a sunday afternoon and make sometimes funny combinations of words.  The only other rule of note is that if you get stuck without a word you can trade in up to three cards as your turn, or flip the top card from the draw pile after you first say whether you are going to keep it or use it to res

Wow, I found a game that's not even mentioned on BoardGameGeek.  Disintegration is a science card game from Relativistics, 1974.  I had this when I was about 13, so I first saw it in 1979.  The idea is to take a chart of the nuclides (all known isotopes organized by atomic weight and neutron count), put your pieces on lead (Pb), and play cards to decay your way all the way down to Hydrogen (H) without going off the chart or hitting a stable isotope which could never decay further in nature.   Sure, that worked way back when.  It wasn't just nerdy, it was nuclear physics, with cards showing how alpha and beta decay and other nuclear events work.  Plus some cards called "Improbable process" where you can play combos that never happen in nature. The cards are still fresh and new... But we have since discovered hundreds of new isotopes.  So look at how crazy big the chart is now.  Even on a scale too small for the plastic pieces to fit in the squares, the first two thirds

I found a 1954 blue box version of the card game Bali in my collection of card decks.  Yes, if you put stuff away in the closet for years, seeing them again can be like going to the store.  Anyway, I remember trying it once before and being unimpressed, but this time we took some time to read the rules more closely and tinker a bit.  The tiny rulebooks from that era were full of ambiguous phrases, and just don't match the precision of modern rule sets now that decades of "rules lawyers" have hashed them out over gaming tables. It turns out to be a solid game.  Let's focus on the two player game, since we are a two player gaming group.  You get 7 columns of cards, like in standard solitaire.  Each column is called a "panel", so each player has 7 panels where they will be building words or parts of words vertically downward. The first few runs we tried it with just 5 panels, since it felt like 7 was too many. So, each turn you can add onto any ONE of your pane

For word gamers, I have brought back an old blog of mine about words with a four-part series on vocabulary building using the letters of four major world alphabets. Check out the English alphabet , Greek alphabet , Hebrew alphabet , and a curious lack of others over on my Word Fixx blog.

We're back with a new playthrough, this time it's a card matching game called Wizard Kittens.  So, the idea is that you are kittens trying to clean the master wizard's lab while he's away, so you are supposed to match ingredient cards to the combinations shown on curse cards to clear the curses and score the points ... before the boss gets back. Setting up the game is a bit of a pain the first time, about 7 different types of cards that have to go in the right places.  But resetting for a second game is much easier, since they are already sorted by type, more or less.  I don't really like games with long setups, but it had a nice clear guide for what goes where.   Here's a look at a game in progress.  Anne's cards are up top facing left, my cards are bottom left, and the curses we are trying to clear are in the middle.  Each turn, a player gets one of four moves: draw a card, discards two cards, move a card to another player's hand, or swap two cards.  A