ScottVee Gaming

Solarquest always felt like space Monopoly to me, and it's hard not to make that immediate comparison.  The property cards are near perfect clones of the ones in Monopoly, you roll two dice and move, you pay some kind of rent when you land on properties owned by opponents, and pick cards with good and bad outcomes.  But there are plenty of differences.  The board is much more interesting -- it has more spaces and the extra challenge where you can't escape from a planet's gravity well if you don't roll high enough.  The need for fuel is a constant pain, but you get to build fueling stations on your own properties and can buy fuel from some generic spaces or from opponents when you land on their spots.  So the fuel acts a bit like the hotels in Monopoly except that you can buy as much as you need, or as much as you can afford, and you always seem to be low again a few moves later.  Spaces that are not planets or moons do not cost fuel to leave.   Of course I was the banke

As a big fan of the Simon's Cat cartoons going back to the early days, I was wary of the any app using those characters.  And a previous version of the Crunch Time game had a big problem with 5-10 seconds of empty black screens after each completed level.  But the latest version got all the dead space cleaned up, and it's now chock full of delightful and funny characters, and you never know what will be coming up next. Yes, it's just another match three app.  No it isn't.  It uses a weird kind of mechanic where you draw lines connecting strings of matching colors.  Usually, you are trying to get a set of cats at the top the right number of green, blue, pink or red kibbles and then they pig out and jump down from the fence.  But the levels get a lot more creative as you move through the levels.  Sometimes there is a big dog that you have to pelt with 40 or 50 kibbles to win the round, or a hilarious angry squirrel that tries to block you by throwing down acorns to clog u

I got the Jumanji game a few weeks back and we finally got to give it a spin.  Sure, I had heard over on BoardGameGeek that it had some logical flaws, but it was a real head scratcher.  It succeeded at being entertaining, sure, so it gets points for that.  But it only had about four simple rules, and they conflicted with each other every step of the way. So, you roll a d8 and move on the board.  Points for choosing a d8, that's just a little different.  It actually comes with five d8s, one of them plain and the other four with special labels on every side, which apparently you get to DIY when you first play the game.  And the game board is a massive, solid piece of work, kudos to the designers.   The main game mechanic is that if you land on a blank space you draw a card and put it in the little red bubble to make the message readable -- that was a thing in the mid-80s and there was even a D&D module that had clues encoded that way.  So you get a funny phrase like in the movie.

We broke open the Trails game today.  The game board is a series of 7 big cards: Trail Head, 5 location cards then Trail End.  There are little cubes in 3 different color for resources, a deck of Photo cards with point values, and a deck of Badges with point values and extra icons. It seemed simple enough, just hike back and forth across the cards and take the resources (or photo card) shown on the card you land on.  If you land on the card with the bear, roll the die to move the bear to another card and get those resources too.  There are a few other bits, like spending your canteen of water to move to any card -- it refills when you get back to the Trail Head later on. When you hit the Trail Head or Trail End, you have a chance to buy Badge cards for the resources shown.  Each time you land on Trail End, you move the sun one card to the left and flip that card to the nighttime side.  It's not too complicated. Except that it feels more complicated than it needs to be.  The art is

We finally got a chance to play through Danger Noodle, a cute little card game we got at the Julian Garage a few weeks back.  The cards have with animals with smart-aleck names and positive or negative values.  You win by getting exactly 30 points of animal cards.  Each turn you can draw as many cards as you like until you get a negative value (your turn is over) or a DANGER NOODLE card (discard all your cards and end your turn) or one of the few action cards that let you trade in cards or take away opponent cards.  One other card worth mentioning is the ANTITOXIN card which lets you ignore the next 3 danger noodles.  Simple enough. Our first run through we ran out of cards and it felt like there was no way to ever get exactly 30 points with all the +1 cards.  We hardly ever had a multiple of 5, always 19 or 37.  It was a mess. The next few games went smoothly.  Anne won one because I had an action card where I had to send her a negative card from my pile and the only one I had was -10