ScottVee Gaming

Here is another card game from Set games .  It has almost the same exact rules as their Quiddler game (see the previous post), but here the cards are five suits of otherwise regular playing cards. The first hand starts with three cards and threes are wild, next hand has four cards and fours are wild, up to a final hand of ten cards with tens wild.  It felt like it dragged a bit on the early hands, where we seemed to just be waiting on either an 8 or a 3 or wild, for example.  Bigger hands had almost too many options, too many wild cards, and seemed to just fall together instead of being built using any kind of strategy. One of my first hands. Here, the scoring only uses unmatched cards after one player goes out, with lowest score winning the game.  I never liked games where Jack is 11, Queen is 12 and King is 13, we just used 10 each.  Unused wild cards count 20, unused jokers count a whopping 50, but really, how would you end up not using one? I ended up grabbing a pair of dice to vis

While staring at our shelf of games, I saw an unopened one that I had no memory of buying, which had apparently been sitting around for years.  It was Quiddler, a word game by Set games .  After which there was another one from the same company called Five Crowns, that we also took for a spin. Quiddler was a solid word-building game with art inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts.  Both games had almost the same exact rules: start with 3 cards in the first hand, 4 cards in the next, up to a final round of 10 cards; after one player melds all their cards and discards on to go out, all other players get one last turn to do their best.  For Quiddler, it just flowed very simply.  Make words, go out.  Here's a typical hand early on: I got some help from an impartial third party for most of that game ... A bit later on, as the hands got bigger, I was seriously wondering if I could bluff a way to make QUANKERER sound like a real word, only to decide that if it was, in fact, a word,

A quick little tale ... Last Sunday we had a white elephant gift exchange, which is a game of sorts.  People kept calling it "the gift game" or just "the game".  I'm not sure it has an actual name, it's too ephemeral a thing.  Since it does have a rule set, some choices to make, and obvious gains and losses, it does qualify as a game.  Anyway, the rules are simple: some number of people each bring a gift, and numbers are pulled from a "hat" (whatever is convenient).  The first player gets to choose a gift and unwrap it.  After that, each player has the choice to steal any unwrapped gift or open a new one.  When your gift is stolen, you get to open a new one.  When a gift is stolen for a third time, it is out of the game and cannot be stolen again. When everyone has had one turn, the first player has a chance to steal any gift, because they did not get that option the first time around. Very simple, and full of laughs.  It was surprising how many pe

Back on the tabletop, we finally broke out my copy of the Mad Magazine Board Game from 1979 that I got about two months ago.  It looked like it would be in the gag-filled "dopey" category, and I was not far off.  But it provided plenty of laughs and "ugh" moments, and was actually a lot of fun. First, it was clear that the rules insert was missing, but that was easily located at BoardGameGeek.com , but the only important detail was how much starting cash you get.  After all, the box bottom boasted that the object of the game was to be the first to lose all your money, and the game board spaces and cards were quite specific enough. So you start with $10,000.  That's really all you need to know if you're missing the rules sheet.  There a few other rules but you could probably guess them: if you land on an arrow box, roll one die and begin on the inner track (like in Careers), only using one die while on the inner track.  And if you take the money from Tough L

I was in zombie mode looking for different styles of game apps that I hadn't already gotten tired of, and saw some clones of the old Breakout game, the Atari arcade favorite of mine from when I was a kid.  It's a simple concept;, bounce balls and break blocks, while everything speeds up to the point where you lose your marbles.  What I was not prepared for is how incredibly similar the games were.  Supposedly from different companies, I tried about 8 of them and almost could not tell them apart.  There were the same screens, the same exact ball dynamics, the same attempts to get micropayments, even the same starting ball counts. Anyway, there are two main categories: one where you have the paddle at the bottom of the screen, and one where you just spit out 50 or 60 balls and watch them do their thing.   I don't really like the paddles on phones, it's no fun trying to drag it around with a finger.  I find that I lose the ball 90% of the time due to the screen getting too

I got a new set of Fluxx cards, this time it was the Astronomy pack.  Just the planets, some stars, galaxies and space exploration cards.  The problem with special media series tie-ins (Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc) is that some players might be huge fans while others know almost nothing about it.  This deck was a nice change of pace because all sci-fi fans should be familiar with the basics of real-world space history. There were no Creeper cards, which was a plus, and we ran through a few hands easily.  We did get into a mess where we ended up with the MOST rule cards we've ever had showing at the same time in any Fluxx pack; we had already used up the two cards that can reset the rules, so we were stuck with them. There were a few odd cards here.  One was Supernova, which blew up the Sun and all planets, which made about half of the goals unreachable after that.  One was Central Axis which took the largest in-play Keeper of the Earth, Sun, Galaxy set and put it in the middle of th