ScottVee Gaming

For the Memorial Day weekend, I grabbed a copy of "the Jungle game" from an eBay seller.  This is a game that is often quoted as being a precursor to Stratego, and the similarities are obvious.  There are pieces with values from 1 to 8 on a board with two big impassable ponds in the middle.  But that's about it.  In Jungle, the pieces start off at fixed locations as shown on the board, and their values are always visible.  In Stratego, you choose where to place all your pieces and you don't know which piece you're attacking until it's too late -- unless you saw the piece before and have a really good memory.  In Jungle, you try to get a piece to a specific space behind the enemy lines, but in Stratego you avoid bombs and try to capture the flag without knowing where it is at the start of the game. After the frustration in previous posts about the faulty, fabricated history of various games, I'm not going to go into all the stories about this game.  Let...

On our trip to the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (see last post), we stopped at the park HQ, which looks like there's absolutely nothing there except a gravel parking lot, restrooms and an infinity of prickly plants.  But the big surprise is that the park HQ is actually built into the earth, and that whole cactus-covered mound you saw actually covers the roof of the place.  It's a wonderful way to build things: first for not cluttering the landscape with another ugly building, then there are benefits when it comes to heating and cooling such a structure.  So, you walk through the glass doors and into a huge open space beneath the mound, with a few thousand square feet of displays, classrooms, even a small theater. Since I am always looking for ways that board games and gaming affect our minds, media and arts, I was pleasantly surprised to see this panel of the extensive nature display: It was about 7 feet tall and 3 feet wide.  It looks like there was supposed to be...

This weekend we took a loop out to the desert, and though it was primarily a sunday drive, at the various stops we looked for board games, card games, and local game-related pieces.  Most gift shops have  decks of cards, but I'm not interested in decks that just stamp some pattern on the flipside of the cards, I want to see attractive uses of the faces of the cards.  Which led to the interesting question of how a prospective buyer is supposed to know what kind of decks they're looking at. Effective packaging will show a few of the card on the back, so if there is a Jack of Spades with a galaxy on it, odds are at least the face cards have custom designs.  But we also saw decks with no clue on tha package about what kind of design it was going to be.  One shop had sample decks hole punched and put on rings so you could flip through each of them.  That was a neat display scheme.  I grabbed a box that said "Don't Die Out There" at the Anza-Borrego Desert S...

Back to the Visiting Bird Nests game.  The other games in those Odhams Press books were mostly roll-and-move or pick-a-card-and-move games but this one looked like it was a little more crafty.  First, it needs a score sheet with the 10 different birds you're trying to collect eggs from.  So I put the names on blank sheets.  I want to do a neat PDF design with the pictures of the birds in the boxes.   We quickly saw that the rules in the little available space were not really complete enough to play a round.  First off, only 8 of the bird circles actually said they gave you eggs, not ten.  But, assuming the Cuckoo gives an egg, the Moorhen gives you an egg and lets you "retain" it, and you get to keep the Kestrel egg (which the circle doesn't list but the paragraph rules do include), that gives 10 different birds with eggs.    Skimming the rules, it sounds like there are no choices at all at first, just draw cards and give or take eggs....

Let's revisit those two books by Odhams Press that I mentioned a while ago .  I finally received actual physical copies of those two volumes, but it took two full months to get to me from the U.K.  The books were "The Children's Book of Games, Puzzles and Pastimes" (undated but cited to be 1952 to 1956) and the second volume "More Games, Puzzles and Pastimes" (copyright 1959 on the very last page).   There were a few simple board games sourced from these books on BoardGameGeek , but the actual books were way more interesting than that.  They didn't have much else to offer from a strictly gaming perspective, aside from those 8 to 10 basic board games, but they had a great range of puzzles, and introduced kids to Nine Men's Morris and the old Fox and Geese peg game, Dots, Battleship, some Checkers variations, and an odd search game on a triangle of 21 spaces called "Cat in the Dark", and more.   The main attraction of the book were the Pastim...

Anne & I played a few rounds of the reissued Dungeon game this weekend.  One reason I picked it up at the game shop was the price: it was only $19.99 when all the bigger, fancier games I looked at were $30-40 or more.  And I remembered the original from about 1982, and heard there was a new version.   I saw that it said "from 1-8 players" and I'm always interested in how games contort their rules to support solo play.  I ran two solo rounds a few nights before, and felt it was a bit plain.  There were three different solo options: "Treasure Hunt" (draw a level 1 treasure card and put it back int the stack, see if you can find it before you get crushed twice) and "Timed Game" (try to win in 30 minutes or beat you previous best time), neither felt like much of an attempt at solo play.   But in the last solo option was "Become the Hunted": it was fun having a Level 6 thing pursuing me from the depths, always moving five spaces, moving throug...

In Abstract Games Magazine issue 13 , they showed a board game I had forgotten about, which they called Surakarta.   I remembered it from Sid Sackson's big book of games, where it's called Roundabouts, but when I tried to play that version a few weeks back, the glaring colors just made my eyeballs throb.  So we printed the back cover of that AGM issue (thanks) but there was one glaring yellow line that also hurt my eyes.  Really?  So I colored that over with purple crayon and we tried a few games. I remembered it as fun, where it starts off slow and they you just loop around and hit teach other from all angles.  But it also gets frustrating, where it feels like you can't even move a piece onto a lane to plan on attacking a piece without getting taken before you get a chance to move.  It feels like you have to expose your pieces on a lane of attack before the opponent is ready; it's important to start an exchange or to have more pieces in a lane to win ...

Trying to get away from obsessive little mobile apps before bed, I found the very rewarding Abstract Games Magazine with over 20 free back issues on their archive page.  What a delight to read about all the unusual games, both old and new.  They take the time to write 8 or 10 pages about strategy tips for Hex, Conway's Phutball, chess variants, a range of mancala games, and those complex Shogi games I can never figure out.  They had a history of 3-D chess that ran to at least 5 parts.  Almost every issue adds a few new games I had not heard about yet, from Gobblet to Hive to Camelot, Takat, Ploy, Dameo, Croda and more. There is a strategy guide to Trax, which was a precursor to Tsuro (one of our favorites) that I didn't know existed.  And I now have the idea of Alice Chess in my head, knowing I will never find a human willing to try it out. I would recommend looking at their latest issue and going to the last page or two where they have the index of all the gam...

Here's a topic that got a lot more interesting than expected.  Where did the game Othello come from?  You know, the one with the chips that are black on one side and white on the other, and when you trap opponent pieces between two of yours, you flip all their pieces.  It's a classic game, plenty of fun an frustrations.  An oddly simple game that I completely suck at.  Every time I try to think ahead I end up giving away more spaces. Let's ask the World Othello Federation.  Oops, their History page is currently blank. Well, the quickest explanation is that Othello is a newer version of Reversi.  The main differences are: in Reversi the board starts off empty, but Othello starts with that 2x2 diagonal black/white pattern in the middle four squares.  Reversi dates back to 1883 (plus or minus a few years, depending on who you ask), created by Lewis Waterman or John W. Mollett (disputed for years), but Othello is credited as being invented by Satoshi...

Tacocat Spelled Backwards is a game from the makers of Exploding Kittens, and the overall cuteness of the package sold us.  "A game with a box that is also the board and a cat that is also a taco," for two players only.  The way the box opens into a simple game board is ingeniously simple.  So, you open the box, setup the taco cat and start dealing cards. The cards are the kind of cute/funny/weird I would expect from these guys.  Odd palindromes with equally odd drawings.  But after a few rounds you don't really look at the drawings anymore.  You play cards to see who goes first, then the bulk of the game is the battle of cards to see who wins the round.  This starts with one player playing their highest card; other player can play an equal or higher card to take the trick, but if they can't succeed at that they must sacrifice their lowest card instead.  With the final pair of cards, the low card wins the hand.  This moves the tacocat one spa...

I was cruising through a long list of board game related videos last night, and it's surprising how dull most of them are.  But THIS guy named BrewStew just nails it.  Here are two parts of an angry cartoon dude ripping on all the board games he grew up with.  Part 1 and Part 2 . No, he doesn't hate games.  He even explains that himself at one point, I think.  What he does do is point out the fundamental flaws and exploits of about a dozen popular games in under a minute each, with foul language but significant flair. Yes, those party games like Pictionary are an anxiety attack in a box for most of us.  And they are so dependent on how well you and your partner can work together or read each other's minds.  Which reminds me of this one where the Carol Burnett family try to play Charades . Apples to Apples? all these "rate the answers" games are arbitrary and pointless.  They make no sense at all.   Everyone chooses a thing and the curre...