ScottVee Gaming

On Idle Planet Miner, I am up to telescope 9, planet 28, finally getting some palladium and my first rhodium.  It has been a long haul.  I never paid much attention to the TAPJOY option on the Boosts tab, since most of those cross-promotions looked like games I would have no interest in playing: Candy Crush, bingo games, slots, overblown battle games, overblown King of Everything games.  But a few were either familiar or seemed harmless, so I tried it out. I played Idle Heroes off and on about 3-5 years ago on a different device, so I wondered if installing it on this tablet would count as "the first time you have installed it".  Yes.  And I didn't mind that the bonus tasks were all VIP levels that involve a few $ of real money, since I know that game was a fun one, and I needed a bunch of dusts and summons to get a team up to speed.  So, VIP1, 2 and 3 got me 3,550 dark matter back in Idle Planet Miner.  It did detect the activity, did give out the rew...

We had a retro board gaming session this afternoon, with two runs of Pirate and Traveller and two games of Careers.   P&T is always fun ... though Anne started off game one by spinning a 30 and getting Havana, then St. Paul MN, then New Orleans all in one round, then Danver just a few spaces away before being diverted to Australia, while I bounced from Alaska to Batavia and back.  The second half of the game, constantly hopping over each other and stealing cards, is a blast. In Careers, we hit some interesting snags.  The first game was close but I ended up with almost no actual money, so I changed my victory conditions for game two to ignore money entirely, just 30 fame and 30 happiness.  So what happened?  I ended up with over $40K and only 4 fame, and while I had 28 hearts, I lost them all a few rounds before the game ended.  Haha.  It's funny how differently the rules for games used to be written.  They don't have the clarity and completen...

I was going through some old piles of papers, figuring out which ones could be scanned and tossed, and I found these three old projects from when I was partnered with Bill Fleming at Nickel Games back around 2003.  We worked on projects off and on from about 1990, for our own little companies, Encore Entertainment, and others.  He died about 9 years ago, and I hate to see fun ideas never seeing the light of day, so here are a few pieces I felt were worth sharing.  We were brainstorming ideas for games that would fit on postcards, so you could mail these little challenges to your friends.  They were meant for young audiences, and are just roll-and-write prototypes that won't win any strategy awards, but here they are... Replaying them now, they're very simple.  But they brought back memories of how they came to be.   For Tic Tac Toes, we wanted a very unlikely roll in the middle, and the 7 in one corner was guaranteed to fall to someone early on; the re...

Anne & I did some quick first takes on Letter Boxing this afternoon before I had to take Sammy the Cat to the vet.  It's a game from James Ernest (the classic game creator, mind behind such classics as Kill Doctor Lucky).  I bought the deck from DriveThruCards.com about a month ago.  Here's the creator's video overview . It really does seem that simple.  I had printed the rules a few weeks back and looked at them a few times, and it sounded like a very ordinary letter game, but I was surprised at how different it actually felt from the many other word games we play.   It is primarily a bluffing game, where you add a card to the letter sequence on the table, and if the opponent thinks you're bluffing and can't make a real word out of that mess, they can challenge you, then you have to make the word (and get the point score for the entire word) or they get the points on the table.  The other option is to Fold, which means you can't add to the word an...

What little gaming time we've had lately, we find ourselves still playing a few games of Yut before bed.  It is still oddly entertaining.  As much as we liked Sorry for its simplicity and occasional shenanigans that you have to say "Sorry" for, Yut packs all that into less than half the spaces, with some very strategic spaces where you get to move to a different track.  Plus the open-ended die rolls where you might be 10 moves behind but roll a 5-5-4-2, bump two pieces and end up a few spaces from winning.  The tables can turn quickly.  Probably a quarter of all games where one player is sure they're going to lose, things go the other way unexpectedly.  Except that we should total be expecting that by now. We had a few cases where a player got their very last piece to the very last square only to get bumped and lose, and if you are bumped by the other player's last piece, they get to roll again because they bumped you, automatic win.  In one case, that...