ScottVee Gaming

After reading about so many games from around the world and across history, one of my favorites for spare time is the game of Yut, which is a Korean traditional game whose origins are lost in the sands of time.  Different researchers say it dates back to the 4th century AD, or the 12th, from one region or another, based on an earlier game, or not ... these are beyond the scope of my gamer's toolkit, and Wikipedia doesn't seem able to sort it out either.  The game was introduced to Westerners by Stewart Culin in 1895 in his book on Korean Games, which can be found in full at Google books. There are some alternate names for the game, with Yut Nori appearing to be the most common, although it looks like yut nori means "yut game".  Other names include Nyout and Korean Yoot , and even Korean Ludo.  Cyningstan has a good page about it, and the Bead Game site has a page as well.  I'm sure I could find many more. Even the meaning of the game seems to have been lost...

I first heard about this game a few years ago.  The first edition was 1911, but of course that one is $100+ if you can find it at all.  The 1936 edition is almost as pricy, but I was finally able to get the 1954 edition in near mint condition and set it up. First of all, I love moving pieces on actual maps.  I also enjoy being the geography textbook who can help anyone find any spot in any country, thanks to my lifetime hobby of collecting stamps from every country.  For some of the places I even found myself starting brief history lessons. This map is very well done.  It is not a graphical marvel by modern standards, but it captures the look of a page from an old atlas of the time period.  The travel routes are very well thought out, and match what I know of the history of trade routes.  The paths all make sense, and that skull in the South Atlantic Ocean fits where St. Helena or Ascension Island would be, so for a geography lover there's more than ju...

This game was in that batch of unrelated games I got this week.  I wasn't expecting much from it, and it delivered pretty much as expected.  It is just a roll-and-move game with the most pointless deck of game cards I have ever seen.  The cards all just say Power, each one worth one Power point.  It also had one of those silly spinners from 1 to 6 where they could have just used a regular six-sided die instead. The game had a few twists, like splitting the path into four separate "missions", though the missions feel exactly the same.  At the end of each mission you have to spin over a four or five (depending on the mission) to move to the next mission or win the game if you're on mission four, and if you fail the roll you lose a Power card and try again next turn; after two fails we just move to the next mission to quit stalling.  The blurbs describing why you lose cards or lose a turn vary from one mission to the next.  We ended up just throwing the p...

I got a batch of three old board games on eBay last week, and they showed up on my doorstep today in a nice chunky box.  I have no idea why the seller put these items together, as they are different themes from different decades, but here they are: The Six-Million Dollar Man, Masterpiece and the 1954 version of Pirate and Traveller (which I have been wanting to see for a while).  Unboxing, they were all in top condition and all the parts were there except Masterpiece was missing the value cards, but I could hop over to BGG to find a list of those and print them myself. First Looks: Masterpiece was the way I remembered it: an oversized board with paintings with values attached to them to buy or auction.  I'm not sure why it even needed the board.  A little deck of cards with those same phrases would do just as well.  I didn't see if there was a rule for landing on another player's piece.  If so, and that's the only reason there's a board, and the...

Looking into increasingly more obscure one-off games online, I came across The Children's Book of Games, Puzzles and Pastimes by Odhams Press, variously quoted as being printed in 1952, 1954 or 1959.  There are about 10 games from this book listed on BoardGameGeek and some fine articles over on Colganology . Odhams is an interesting publisher , ranging from mainstream magazines to Zap! comics.  I would like to see the whole book that these came from, but it's a $50-80 rarity right now.  The games looked trivial at first and yes, they mostly involve pulling cards from a deck and getting some points or moving a piece each time.  But they also feel like useful prototypes for more useful games.   My favorite of the batch has the eminently colorful name of The Game of Visiting Birds' Nests Without Robbing Them .  You pull cards, check the image for the matching bird or animal, which gives or takes some number of eggs.  Another twist is that you have to kee...

Utopia Engine is a big, solitaire print-and-play game available at PnPArcade It is an impressive creation, with all the care that obviously went into it, and it has a big story about an artificer trying to rebuild a fabled machine to prevent Doomsday.  We were in the middle of the pandemic and I heard about it from one of many Youtubers who were talking about solo games -- that's how I discovered PnPArcade and Utopia Engine.  I played the two-page black and white version, though there is also a compact one-page version and a gorgeous full color PDF as well.  Check out its BoardGameGeek page for a look at these other layouts. At first, it was fun rolling the dice and following along in the rules to figure out which boxes to put the scores in, and how they add up to success or failure of each task.  By the end of the first page, I was finding some possible grey areas, just not sure if a certain combo could be scored or not, and I more or less just drifted off to other...

The Great Races is one of the one-page games created by Sid Sackson, published in Games Magazine.  This one was in the Jan/Feb 1978 issue.  It's what we would now call a "roll and write" game, where you roll dice and make some kind of markings on paper or a score sheet. It's not complicated.  The score sheet represents a series of horse races.  You take turns rolling four dice and splitting them into two combos of two dice for scoring.  You mark off boxes in the 2 through 12 rows as needed.  First one to complete a row gets the higher point score shown next to that row.  At that time, if another player is past the double line, they get the second place (smaller) bonus.  That's it. It starts off as just roll and write, but once a race is finished, it's finished.  If race 4 is done, nobody gets to score a 4 anymore.  So toward the end there's some competition for the remaining numbers.  You can eyeball the scores along the way, and sh...

I don't know what to expect after passing the defined infinity of $ee200.  But the next Supremacy upgrade is at 1000 psi to unlock x_1, and I have done a lot more Prestiges (112 total) to get to $ee268, which gives a psi of 995.76 ... and counting .... and there it is, 1000 psi. So now I'm back at b=0.001 but there is a new list of x_1 to x_8 beneath the x value.  Interesting expansion.  There is a new equation beneath the main equation (where x has been replaced by x_1), where each x_i is x_(i-1)*dt.  So with x=1e11 and dt at 38, expect x_1 to be 3.8e12.  Nope, I have x=1.1e24 and dt=42, but x_1=6.4e27, meaning x is being multiplied by roughly 6000. The equation is actually writtem x_i = x_i + x_(i-1)dt but surely x_i can't be part of its own recursive definition? Future psi upgrades are "y exponent +0.2" for 2000 psi and unlocking x_2 for 64,000 psi.  Those sound like long hauls, and of course the equation tops off more severely as the value keeps going u...

I made it to the first Supremacy and of course it reset everything except the boosters I paid stars for, like it said it would.  It took far less time to build back up to the $ee30 range.  I hit $ee50 again today, after a few more Prestiges, and got some mixed signals.  First, the Supremacy button said to wait until d(psi)>1.5 again, but now I saw what it meant.  I had 0.08 psi left over from left time, so the new psi value would have to be 1.58.  Yup, the Supremacy button unlocked, but then it had a warning "You will not yet be able afford any psi-based upgrades yet."  True, the cheapest of those was 6 psi, so I should wait to hit 6 psi before doing the next Supremacy, or I will not get any new options by doing so.  Right now it's topped out at $ee56.796, and psi it at 2.08.   At this point, there is no reason to buy upgrades to the top few variables, since they have no effect on the significant digits of x, which sits at 4.7...

I stumbled upon another case of game duplication ... Idle Ocean Cleaner (IOC) is exactly the same as Idle Planet Miner (IPM) which I have been playing for a while, even though they are from different developers.  Sure, they have different themes and skins.  The UI buttons are the in about the same order all the way around.  The main screen has little white ships bouncing back and forth from islands (planets) to your base.  If you zoom out just enough, those ships look like whiteflies, if you've ever seen a bush afflicted with those.   Comparisons: - IOC has islands (IPM has planets) - rafts (asteroids) - types of plastic trash (ores to mine) - Resources panel with three tabs: plastics, recyclables, products (ores, alloys, items) with a slider at the bottom for what % of the item you wish to sell.  - a Production panel with Recycling (Smelt) and 3d Printing (Craft), and you have to research to unlock the crafter. The IOC recipes make NO sense, like you c...

Roll Estate is a dice-rolling game by Chris Richaud which can be found a Print-and-Play over at PNPArcade for just $3.  There are some extra posts and ideas on BoardGameGeek , including a brief interview with the creator. It's a buffed-up Yahtzee game, which is fun because we all know Yahtzee, so you start with a foot forward, AND many of us would like to think of ways to expand Yahtzee or give it a more concrete meaning.  Well, Roll Estate frames the die rolls in terms of buying real estate and making investments. I have played it a few times in the black and white version, as shown.  The color PDF is quite vibrant,  and the graphics add a lot of character, but my old core printer was very slow and frank ink like crazy.  The sheet looks complicated, but there are the usual 1's to 6's and 3-of-a-kind and 4-of-a-kind at the top in the Real Estate section, with the other familiar rolls down below in the Investment section.  Up top, you essentially get to sco...

I looked at Trainstation 2 first and it had better graphics, but the tutorial seemed to go on forever, never letting me make my own choices.  Maybe you get more freedom after a while, I don't know.  But I installed Tiny Rails a few days later and I like everything about this one better.  It has pixel art but it is very well done, especially the moving landscapes and train cars, day/night cycles; very well done.  After getting the feel of it, you pretty much just cruise from city to city with passengers and cargo.  Its most surreal bit is that you get new cars from ... a gumball machine??  There is some humor spread throughout, like the time my engineer asked me to get carrots to try as a new fuel source, and failed, and said she wasn't much of an engineer after all. There are hundreds of cars to choose from, from normal working cars to taco cars, muffin cars, a kiwi petting car (really!) ... you name it, it's fun to see what you might find next ... so you g...

Here is a pair of games from different developers, which I felt had rich graphics and completely different themes, so I installed them and took a shot at them ... but they turned out to be almost the same exact game.  In Auralux: Constellations (War Drum Games), you send streams of dots to capture planets, where in Microcosmum (Satur Entertainment) you send streams of antibodies to capture cells. These are both graph-based hex capture puzzles.  Either one could be simulated in Warzone, except for the high style points they both get.  I sure lost the top one: about halfway through I scrolled out and saw there was a bigger green planet just off the bottom of the screen.  I ended up losing the bottom game also.  I was blue in both games, just another coincidence. In Microcosmum, you get little icons of genetic code after each win, and you use those to power up your cells: antibody speed, armor strength, and such.  I only got through a few levels of each before...

Here's a game that I played for a while about 2-3 years back, and when looking at it again to get screenshots, it has a distinct look and feel and is as enjoyable as I remembered.  Dice Hunter has you finding dice representing creatures from a range of mythologies.  Each die has a certain combination of sides, and a special power with a recharge cost.  Overall, the game has a solid design and friendly graphics. Here is what a die looks like in the detail view: And here is my set of six selected dice in action against a range of foes.  They drop down as you eliminate them, and falling will stun them for one round, which is a big part of the strategy. When your dice are charged, they glow.  The number at left of center is the number of "locks" you have left.  The dice show swords (attack), shields (defense), lightning bolts (energy) and stars (stars, I guess).  Each round you can lock some number of dice by clicking them, then swipe the rest to roll them...

I was going through my shelf of old RPG books recently and found my original copy of Starbase Jeff tucked away on a shelf.  This was one of the low-cost classic games created by CheapAss Games back in the 1990s.  It came in a paper sleeve and had just the instructions and space station tiles you would need to play.  The designer knew that we already had heaps of dice and tokens and pawns to use, so he only printed the unique items.  They were always twisted, quirky and fun.  Yup, James Ernest, someone I really admired as a game creator.  Blast from the past. I had an urge to Google him and see where his creative mind ended up.  Not only is he still around, but there is still a website for CheapAss Games , and he put about 20 of their old games on their website as free print-and-play versions. It was fun to see them again, including ones I had never seen back then, and ones I had never heard about.  And of course, Kill Doctor Lucky, which works fin...

After my last post turned into a bit of a tirade about the creep of huge, exponential numbers in the current crop of idle games in the Google Play store, this one turns all that on its head. Exponential Idle just shows an equation and lets you tweak the variables. It starts with this unassuming blurb: From there you get the main screen, showing the exponential equation that drives the whole game.  This was such a pleasant contrast from the games with thousands of graphical things bouncing around.  And I have always been fascinated with mathematics.  You should only need algebra to understand what's going on here.  Each tick (10 times per second), the app takes the current number and multiplies it by e to the power of b times x times dt.  f(t+dt) -- which means the current time plus the next tick -- equals the current value f(t) times e^(bxdt).  Perfect.  It shows these numbers at the top of the screen and they tick upwards as you make adjustments. The ...

It seems like every other game in the Google Play store these days is an idle clicker of some kind.  These all have some kind of theme where you try to ramp up numbers exponentially, whether the numbers make any sense or not.  And you can earn maybe 2 hours of progress while offline. I tried a few and ended up quitting them after an hour or two.   Idle Apocalypse had a fun theme, breeding monsters to go beat on the adventurers outside the gates.  The pixel art really didn't work for me, but there were plenty of funny comments from the NPCs along the way.  I could not figure out what some of the little icons were supposed to mean, so an Ogre had 50 of whatever and maybe 200 health, and some other thing.  The screens where you level them up were also not very clear.  I guess you're just supposed to be happy whenever numbers go up.  What burned me was after I built five floors of stuff and added a Landing Pad where a balloon comes every ten minu...