ScottVee Gaming

I had Outdoor Survival on my game shelf since the 80's at least.  A few years ago, I gave my board game collection to a family who was having actual board game nights.  At the time I had no players at all willing to come over and game, so it felt like a good move.  Now I wish I had half of those games back.  Not all of them, because THAT would be mental.  But some of them were classics, like Outdoor Survival. It's a famous game board, which is described as "13,200 acres of the great outdoors".  A three-part heavy folding board, and yes, the little plastic clips that are loose in the box are meant to hold the parts of the board together. The rules start you with a basic game, where you start at the base (number 5) in the middle of the board, and the first player to make it off the East or West edge of the board wins.  Here I am a few moves into a solitaire game. The basic rules are simple: roll a die to see your movement options.  Move.  Repea...

I discovered the "Blizzard of 77 Travel Game" through eBay searches for other games.  I don't remember what I was looking for, but it came up as a suggestion and looked like a lot of fun.  Having grown up in upstate New York myself, we lived through some crazy snowstorms as a kid, before the family moved to Long Island, so it was a fun topic.  I was able to reconstruct the board in my notebook of game design history, but there's no substitute for getting the real thing.  What you can't easily reconstruct from images or other people's game stories are the decks of event cards.  Not to mention the feel of the nice thick game board.  So, I found a near-mint copy listed for about $30.  With shipping, it was about the cost of a mid-range new board game. You start out on the Sunny Side of the board.  The goal is to get to all five locations and collect a card from each one, then get home for the win.  So here we are on the Sunny Side... When you la...

The last few weeks I have been in and out of a series of friday night D&D sessions.  The group has been gaming together for 30 years, and technically, our extended group goes down to the grandchildren of some of the original players.  Lifelong GM Doug was running a campaign near the city of Cordegast on his Bead world which has been in the works for decades, and we started off at first level.  I am a big fan of the original few versions and the simplicity of it all, so here was my chance to see how weird and colorful the 5e rules really were.  So ... I am a satyr artificer named Narvik.  It's fun being a starting adventurer who is still afraid of everything.  I am running my guy as a drama queen with chaotic principles, who also wants to look fabulous.  I seek out treasures and new flavors, then buy flashy things and get tired of all that material stuff so easily.  My mixed bag of abilities may not turn out to be useful, and with a Wisdom of 8...

I was bored late at night and was browsing through some Facebook board game seller group, listings of the same common stuff over and over.  Then someone was offering a like-new copy of the 1979 game of CAREERS for a few bucks plus shipping.  It got here yesterday, and not only was it somehow crisp and new, but it was way more fun than I remembered. Now, I had found screen shots of 4 or 5 different editions of this classic game online, but the tiny text in the career boxes made them unusable and print-and-play test runs.  With each new edition, the career paths changed, each fitting their decade.  It is a fascinating history. Sometimes when people say they remember the game of LIFE, ask them if they remember the little cars with the people pegs, or the spinner popping off and wiping all the cars off the board ... if they don't remember that, I suspect they were actually remembering CAREERS instead.  The two games occupy a very similar niche, but in different ways...

NMBR9 is an odd little game I got about a year ago when I drove over to Oceanside to buy a big stack of board games from a guy on Facebook.  I didn't get a chance to look at it until now.  Unboxing is fun, punching out all those thick cardboard numbers and stacking them in the number-shaped spaces in the box. This is a sort of Tetris-style shape fitting game using numbers with intentionally awkward shapes.  Really, you just shuffle the short stack of cards and then flip them over one at a time until they are gone.  If the card shows a 3, all players take a 3 and try to add it to their layout. So easy!  Except for the awkward shapes that often don't fit anywhere.  The trick to building the layout is that a number tile must be placed alongside another tile, or on top of two or more numbers.  With NO gaps beneath them.  And then the scoring is a matter of deconstructing the pile where the bottom layer counts zero, the first layer on top of that count...

A while back, I got Kingdomino from Barnes & Noble.  It was so colorful, and we didn't have any games yet that wrapped a theme around domino-style play.  It turned out that I actually bought a deluxe edition which included a Royal Bonus Pack and the Giants Expansion.  Let's stick to the base game for now.  We got the domino selection rules wrong the first time around, but once we got the scoring worked out, there was a fun little genius behind this one.  The tiles have numbers on the back, 1 through 48.  The higher numbers are tiles that will probably score higher but be harder to place in your layout. You start with a home tile and a little 3-d castle to put there.  Then the goal is to build a 5x5 kingdom with adjoining areas of matching terrain.  Each domino shows two terrain tiles.  Say you end up with four connected desert tiles, and one of the tiles shows two crowns ... you get 4x2 points at the end of the hand. That's it. For two pl...

I got the game of Baba Yaga at the local game shop.  I have liked the look of this series of games for a while now; they are designed to look like old tomes full of secrets.  It came with a big story booklet, so you get "a story and a game".  And Baba Yaga is one of my favorite strange characters from Eastern European mythology. Unpacking it, it looked great, and it was fairly enjoyable figuring out the rules.  But it had some weird physical component that we just found annoying.  Overall, it's a simple game where one player flips tiles and tries to find the 3 or 4 ingredients that match the card in their hand.  Meanwhile, the other player(s) are moving the witch figurine back and forth across the spaces at the middle of the game layout, counting down how much time they have left. That is all quite enjoyable.  Moving the witch as a sort of timer was a fun, ominous game dynamic.  And there are cards that can add or remove one space from the witch's...