ScottVee Gaming

Of the odd mix of new apps I have tried in the past 2-3 weeks, Dungeon Cards is the winner that I think is worth talking about. About a year ago, I wrote a post about some of the smallest board game layouts possible, and whether anything really interesting can happen in a space that's 3x3 or less.  That's where this cute little retro-graphics dungeon crawler comes in.  Yes, it's a 3x3 grid where you are the main character and you can only move up, down, left or right and choose which other cards to interact with. It is deceptively simple, and your first few games will probably fizzle out quickly, but once you learn how to make better choices, it is entirely possible to get those 900 points to unlock Dungeon Three. Basically, there are weapons you can use, mobs to fight, obstacles (bombs, dynamite, poison, flamethrowers and spikes) to avoid, chests to open, gold and rubies to pick up, and potions to heal up again.  The virtual deck of ever-changing cards is very well de...

I have seen a lot of cases lately of YouTubers putting together videos of their own "best boards games" of some decade, or century, or from their own childhood, and I have been impressed at the wide range of clips they have been able to dig up from old TV shows and cartoons showing fictional family game nights.  So I have been trying to track down some of those clips. Going wayy back, here is a gem from the Carol Burnett show .  It is a brilliant pick for the one board game this bunch of high-strung, irritable characters should never EVER try to play together ... Sorry! Except that it's not quite the game of Sorry as we know it.  Interesting.  The writers have two main choices here: get the rules exactly right and come up with a set of rolls that produce the exact outcomes shown, or just do a basic setup of how you remember the game being played, and trust the actors to sell it to the audience, which will be a lot more fun to watch.  We're not here for a lesson ...

I got up to about planet 36 and nearly finished with the tech tree, so I guess it's time to sell my galaxy again.  Some stats: $66.84T on hand Galaxy Value $198.3T worth 376 credits Ores: over a million of each, down to Palladium, then 691K Osmium, 347K rhodium, 15.5K inerton. Alloys: 1-200K each down to gold, except only 352 silver, then 761 bronze, 402 steel, 348 Pt, 83 Ti, 51 Pd, 150 Os, 52 Rh, 25 inerton. It's fun having the big numbers, like the planet boosts that are up to $19T.  And I'm not sure there's much new that's going to happen in this game, just more research, more weird ores and stuff to idly spend the weird ores on.  But I do have 10 good managers, though I will be reduced to 3 manager slots again after the sale, I suppose.  It will be good to have big boosts in production speed, but is it really a sensible goal to redo everything I did in the last month, only 220% faster? Almost complete tech tree, mosaic of a few screenshots I tried building a spr...

The Fox in the Forest is a pretty basic trick-taking game for two players with a small deck of cards.  Each player has a 13 card hand and there is a draw pile of 7 with the top card turned over.  This flipped card is the trump card, and its suit sets the trump suit for the round.  One player leads with a card, the other player responds with a card.  High trump suit card wins, then high card in the leading suit, then any other high card.  You get points for how many tricks you take each round, and winning too many tricks is penalized. You can play a hand or two with just those rules, then introduce the rules written on the cards.  Some cards let you change the trump card, or draw another card, or change the scoring. Pretty simple.  We're a bit weary of playing card games with rules printed on the cards.  It's cute and a bit "meta", but it's also a lot of small print and extra fuss.

We saw PayDay at a yogurt shop in Morro Bay last weekend (see previous post), and it looked like it would be fun to try out, so we picked up a copy at The Game Seeker in Santa Barbara.  It was a different edition, with a much bigger format for the rulebook, but I don't know if there were any meaningful changes between the two. It's another "roll and move and exchange money" game.  One player acts as the banker (which always turns out to be me) and one player acts as the loan manager (see below).  As a neat twist, the game board is a month on a calendar -- 31 spaces to get to Pay Day. You start by choosing how many months to play.  Pay Day is when all the activity hits the fan: you get a $3500 paycheck but have to pay all the bills you got on mail cards along the way.  You can also pick up Deals from certain spaces, which you may choose to buy or not, and when you land on a Found a Buyer space you get to sell a deal at full value.  The last few days of the ...

We stopped at the Huntington Library up in Pasadena on Monday and saw they were running an exhibit called " Mapping Fiction ".  It was primarily about how maps are used by story tellers and travel writers, with maps on display of both real and imaginary places.  Oddly, they had a copy of the board game "Around the World with Nelly Bly" from about 1893. I only knew of this game from a screenshot I found online last year, where it appeared in black and white as a full-page spread in one of the British daily papers at the time. Most board games of this period were the "Game of the Goose" variety, just roll and move on a spiral toward the center with 70 to 90 spaces.  This is no different, it just takes an interesting historical theme.  One thing to note is that the tiny rules on the bottom say that if you land on a space that tells you to move to another space, you should ignore any rules printed on that new space.  Otherwise, it looks like you could bounce a...

We just got back from a 5-day loop up the central coast of California.  While we didn't stop at every little nook and thrift shop looking for games specifically, I did do a game run in Santa Barbara on Sunday. At a thrift shop we found Mummy Math and Shark Bingo, neither one looked very fancy but they were both in low-end cardboard boxes that did not close well, so they are probably from smaller game houses. At a retail game shop  I grabbed Queendomino, to go with the Kingdomino set that we enjoyed, along with Kingdomino Duel,  the card game Fox in the Forest, a book of Mad Libs, and that Payday game we saw a few nights ago over 100 miles away, which looked like it was worth trying. Just some fun on the road, the meta game of finding games in realms and styles we enjoy.

On a trip to Morro Bay, we stopped at Grandma's Yogurt on Main St while the street fair was going on.  They have a nice courtyard called The Gathering Place which had live music going.   They also had a table of boardgames,  as you can see here.  It was rather breezy at the time so while it sounded like fun my first thought was that the cards and paper money might just blow away.  So, mark that as a new category of games: the ones that can be played outdoors.  So I opened the box carefully, only to uncover the other issue with this arrangement: each game had all the parts just stuffed back into the box, a mixed up jumble of cards, money and bits.  So, trusting people to treat the games nicely is tricky.  I sorted the cards and bills for those two,  and we didn't think they were playable outside.  Putting Twister out is public was just a bit twisted.  It's nice to see games available.  The girl working there said it all use...