ScottVee Gaming

I pretty much gave up on Exponential Idle.  I can grind a little on breaks or pit stops, but this has been 3 weeks straight of nothing new, just numbers getting more excruciatingly slow.  Skip it. Oddly, after all the fun I had with Tiny Rails the first few nights, it does get repetitive.  There is an overall story that they really want you to follow, finding new cars is amusing, but the trip between towns can be up to a minute of sitting there wondering why.  I will probably visit again at some point, when the mood strikes. I have finished every bonus paid pack in Microcosmus, and can now only play the endless level generator, what they call "the Pool."  It brings up some interesting points.  When I used to code games on my own -- not counting the big projects I did for Cetasoft and Interplay and Encore -- it was the good old days of shareware where if you put out 10 levels and a little level editor you were good.  One out of 10,000 downloaders might ...

 A possible numbering for a Yut board, so that moves from our favorite game sessions can be shared:  9  8  7  6  5 10 22    17  4     23  18 11    19     3     24  20 12 25    21  2 13 14 15 16  1             FINISH Numbered this way (around the outside, then the shortest path, then the other paths), that funny ending would have been Board position: A: 1 done, 21(3); B: 16(4).  The number of pieces stacked is in parentheses. Each needs just 2 to win. Then the finishing moves in that game I mentioned were, with rolls written in brackets: 1. A: [1] 21-1        B: [1] 16 x 1(3) 2. A: [2] 0-2       B: [2] FINISH(4) = WIN Some notes on choices that come up. - You have one piece on 19 (center) and roll [-1].  Move back to ...

We finally sat down to do a test run of Masterpiece (1970) that I got a few weeks ago.  Even from just skimming the rule booklet, it felt like it would be better with more than two players.  With two players, we felt that Private Auction was unusable, since there are only two outcomes: I make a crazy low offer and you choose your cheapest painting to sell me, or you choose a painting and I offer you the minimum for it.  It takes two players to do a pretend auction, and if you can't bid on your own art, there is no point.  So we just rolled again whenever we landed on a Private Auction. As I suspected, the big giant game board served no real purpose and could have been replaced with a little deck of action cards.  Either way, you randomly get one of these: cash, auction for the top painting on the deck, buy or sell a painting to the bank, buy or sell a painting to another player, or the one-off where you inherit a painting with no payment needed. It basically com...

I'm not sure there really needs to be a "strategy guide" to any of the endless match-3 app games out there, but here are some tips specifically for Kitten Match.   These games all tend to have the same power ups: - a thing that will clear a row or column (in this case it's a "rocket"), - a thing that will remove all icons within a block or two (bomb), a thing that will fly over to hit another icon (missile), - and a thing that will remove all icons of the matching type (cat ball).   Meanwhile, this game has standard types of boosters: - one to remove any one icon (scoop), - one swap any two (I forget what it's really called, we call it the swapper) - and one to remove one full row AND column (claws).   You match four in a row to get rockets, and the direction of that match determines the direction (row or column) of the rocket.  Four in a square gets a missile, five in a row gets a cat ball, and five in an "L" shape gets a bomb. Of the obstacle...

Microcosmum has been a relaxing pasttime before bed the past week or two, although I do get sucked into playing "just one more level".  Their pricing is so reasonable I bought all the extra level bundles except the one where you can paint your cells with colors.  On the downside, my evolution is maxed out and I keep getting new genes that I will never be able to use.  I was hoping the new packs would have new genes.   Sure, you get strange new things living in the Petri dish with you.  I was hoping they would come with some kind of profile page telling you what they are or what they can do, but I guess they will just be "things" without names.  On some levels, there are bigger things which spawn the smaller things, and it can be quite a battle to fend off the bugs and wipe out the AI cells so you can finally focus on the spawners.   The grand strategy isn't all that grand.  Most of the time I just hit the Select All Antibodies button and tap a tar...

After playing many rounds of Yut on different apps, I see some interesting patterns.  I only found one article which tried to do a game theory analysis of it, and it broke it down into a one-dimensional line of 21 spaces, saying that the addition of the decision points on the corners makes the math too complex.   The main goal of the article was to see if always bumping was a better winning strategy than always stacking ... only to find less than 1% difference in the outcomes.  So, does that mean that the rules are very well balanced, or that random factors outweigh any strategy?  Maybe those two cancel out, and the choice of paths is more tactical.  How much weaker would bumping a piece be if you didn't get that extra roll?  One of the apps has an AI where it is likely to run one piece all the way around the board before bringing in other pieces, even if it ends up on the long path, which as you play it is clearly a terrible strategy, easily beaten. ...

The Queen's Gambit led to talk of Bobby Fisher's career, and the astounding world events of the match with Boris Spassky in 1972.  Which led to the film Pawn Sacrifice (2014) with Tobey Maguire as Fisher and Liev Schrieber as Spassky.  Almost immediately, you see Fisher as a thoroughly obnoxious, screwed-up guy.  Even telling his own mother to "move the f**k out" at the age of about 15 and flying off the handle on everyone else from beginning to end. I had Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess on my shelf by about age ten (1976).  I know we tend to idolize people, but I find it hard to believe he was anything like that.  But as you look more deeply, you find more wild incidents and disturbing tangents; raging outbursts and a head full of conspiracy theories.  How much of it was real, and how much was part of the stress or strategy or meta-game, or just a guy trying to cope with unwanted fame?  What's clear is that Fisher was a fascinating person, and I found Magu...

We finally sat down and watched The Queen's Gambit over the last two weeks.  It was good to see a whole mini-series based on a game, though of all the games most likely to figure into TV shows and movies, chess must be the one -- its unique combination of simplicity and infinite combinations just naturally lends itself to stories about those mortals who have tried to conquer it.  Anya Taylor-Joy was exceptional, being so far into the character that it to a lot of effort to remember that she wasn't real.  The supporting cast all turned in fine performances of characters with differing levels of quirks and compulsions.  I give the series a 9 of 10, but don't want to turn this into a Netflix review.   I wondered how many of the players in the story were real players.  I would expect the core cast to be fictional, and all the masters they looked up to, who wrote all the books, to be real.  They mentioned Capablanca, Alekhine, Morphy ... I had read ab...