ScottVee Gaming

I was looking for old apps on my tablet that I could delete to make room to test new things, and saw the old icon for Idle Heroes.  I played that about 2 years ago and have tapped on it a few times since then.  It's actually a gorgeous game just chock full of activities, screen after screen of things to do. Here is the home page where you access all the different areas and stages of the game: At its core, it's another game where you build a team of heroes that can level up and get new equipment, and of course the equipment can also level up.  Initially, you click the Campaign island and your heroes fight their way through the levels, unlocking major features on the home world page as you go.  I didn't write them all down, but right now I have to unlock Campaign stage 13-8 to unlock the Auction House.  These are well spaced out so there is always something to work towards and look forward to. Here is my page of heroes: And here's my top hero, showing the stats screen and

I ended up at a Dave & Busters arcade yesterday for my brother's 51st birthday, along with his son who is about 8.  Considering it's a huge room full of gaming machines, I expected to have a lot to say from a game perspective.  Sure, there were big machines with short versions of Frogger, Monopoly, Crossy Road, Wheel of Fortune, machines branded with Star Trek, Ghostbusters, various zombie franchises, games where you can fish, bowl, shoot hoops for points ... a huge variety.  But it was a sensory overload and I can't think of a useful way to discuss any of it.  I suppose for the few games we spent more than a minute playing, there were these: There was a 6-player jumbo Pac-Man table with some strange add-ons to the original.  This was a lot of fun.  You can try to eat the dots or just chase each other around and get ghosted when you're not paying attention.  Trouble is, the games were not designed for long play times.  They tease for a minute or less and

I am interested not just in board games, but also the makers of board games.  You never know what will be in these little boxes.  For Cover You Assets, there was a leaflet talking about the mom-an-pop game company and their family.  Check out Grandpa Beck's Games for more about them, their games, and their fun videos.  Looks like a fun bunch. Cover Your Assets is a fairly simple card-matching game.  It is meant for 3-6 players but has a big 2-player variation starting on page 12 that works very nicely.  So that is what I will describe here. The cards represent various assets with prices, like Comic Books, Jewels, a Piggy Bank, and so on.  There are also gold and silver cards which act as wild cards and have the highest card values ($50K and $25K).  In the 2-player game each player gets a hand of 6 cards and there are 3 stacks of 10 dealt out with top card showing (the Draft Piles). Now, each turn you can either (1) make a set from your hand, (2) draft a set from your hand plus a t

Sometimes it seems like the kid's section of Barnes & Noble has some of the most fun games.  Sure, most of them seem a little too young, but we have found quite a few winners over there, including Cat Crimes, which I think was the very first one I wrote about in this blog series. Today we tested out We Detectives, which was fun to unbox and pop out all the little pieces.  While it's not one of the "most fun" games ever, it was cure and entertaining, with a few things (as usual) open to interpretation the first time around but making more sense the next time. There are diamond-shaped location tiles with go on the Location spaces on the board, so those are in different places each time.  Then a dozen evidence tiles which show the items you need to find.  As you find them, you put your pieces into the middle part of the game board and the first player to find all their pieces wins.   Game play is driven by the stack of "WePhone" cards, which represent incom

I was looking for old apps to remove from my tablet and saw that I was not far from completing that nonogram game "Two Eyes", so I finished that.  After all the regular levels, there are some Finale levels of 30x30 puzzles, then a final scene.     I don't expect much from the stories in app games, and don't really know what this one was trying to say, but the puzzles were well balanced and fun throughout. Looking at other games from the same developer, I downloaded Wish Stone next.  I remember when Anne finished all puzzles in both apps last year and I wondered how that was even possible.  Wish Stone has a story about a sick princess and a cure found in a magical city on the back of a sky whale.  Meh.  But the puzzles are familiar.  There were about 10 screens of 8-10 puzzles each of 10x10 and 15x15, and I think four screens of 20x20 puzzles -- which I have completed.  The main story is split up by character, with three characters having about 8 pages of a 5x5 grid of

This weekend, we picked some favorites off the shelf and had some good sessions.   Careers: a few moves away from meeting her winning conditions, Anne lost all her hearts and had to start over.  I was stuck with about 30 stars and 50 hearts when I really only wanted 10 of each, but just could not make any dollars.  And then, when I got within sight of the $40K I needed, I lost 54 hearts.  And you know what?  The game is not really designed to go on for that long.  We both had all of the careers checked off and could just hop on any career track, but it still felt like we were spinning our wheels and going nowhere.  Conclusion: losing all your fame or happiness is too much of a penalty -- losing half would be a better balance and prevent the game from going into the doldrums. Finding Nemo: This is always quick and fun.  Sometimes it is just a nice even run to the ocean, and sometimes one player just gets terrible rolls and can't go anywhere.  It is fun to build your track while cutt