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Showing posts from November, 2022

A Batch of Peg Games

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A while back I heard about some new auction app and skimmed some listings and found these little wooden peg games. They made me think of the times I would be out on a road trip somewhere and stop at a little diner, and they would have games likes these.  Though the diners usually had variations of simple peg solitaire ("golf") and no dice to roll. These were all simple racing games, dressed up in sport themes.  Just roll dice and move.   They each came in plastic wrap with a red and a blue peg and two dice. The football one was playable.  The golf one was unplayable because there were more negatives than positives, especially -3 spaces for rolling a 7; but Anne did roll a two on her second roll and got a hole-in-one win.  For the next 10 minutes I don't think either of reached the halfway mark before getting sent back.  The derby game was just going around in circles, and we used an extra die each to track which lap we were on.  The rules for tennis were cut off but I gue

Careers (1965)

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We covered the 1979 edition of Careers early this year.  I wanted to see one of the older versions, figuring there would be some less politically correct squares.  So here is the 1965 edition.  Sure enough, there were some comically tasteless things to run into.  That space that says the director likes you now sounds creepy. The main difference is that the 1965 version has 8 career paths and 8 squares on each side of the board.  The newer version has 6 career paths and 7 squares per side.  The newer board removed Uranium Prospecting and Farming, and changed Sailing into Sports.  As for those other four squares on the board, they were the four squares we pretty much ignored: Auto Show (change cash into hearts), Statue in the Park ($ into Fame), Yacht Show (cash into hearts again) and an obnoxious space where "wife goes shopping" and spends d6x10% of all your cash on hand.  I don't recall in the newer game that the player with the medical degree gets to collect cash from p

Idle Planet Miner - Debris Fields

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I finally completed research for the debris field in Idle Planet Miner.  It only took about a full month of what little time I have to fiddle with it daily. Yes, the debris fields are automatically harvested, just like the asteroids.  I have seen two debris fields appear so far.  One gave me a satellite dish and the other gave 71 basic computers.  So they are pretty much exactly what I was expecting: a source of random items. Here is one I caught in a screenshot... I added the white box so you can see it better.  They are gone in about 5 seconds like the asteroids so you might not see them most of the time.  I suddenly have 60 advanced computers, 700 lasers and a ton of other things.  Now I need 5 more nuclear reactors and 92 scrith alloy for the only other research available: superior asteroid harvester, another x1.3 value bonus.  I guess I can also do Advanced Leader for 8 more motors, 8 telescopes and 111 scrith alloy. I also made it to planet 43, the $6.2q investment, the first one

Chemistry Games: Merge Elements

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Here is a game that uses the chemical elements in a creative way and is not just another quiz.  Merge Elements by Scienchro is basically a "drop and match" game, so it's not groundbreaking, but it is very solidly coded and has its own kind of perks.  As you drop tiles, two matching tiles numbered N produce a tile numbered N+1.  Three matching tiles can produce an N+2 tile, and they can continue to drop and interact.  Side-by-side matching will favor the dropped tile, moving the merged result there, so you can pull a tile off a lower numbered tile by dropping a matching tile to the left or right of it.  As you discover new elements, you get coins. While it does not have the silly fun of the irregularly shaped heads from the Pop Cats game that roll around and merge in between moves, a single drop here can still produce an unusual chain reaction of the tiles.   You can use some of your earned coins to start the game at a higher atomic number. Note that only 12 different elem

PackOGames: Boo

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We had about an hour to burn before going to a coworker's wedding, and a board game or card game is a good way to chill out.  I grabbed a few new games last week (Happy Little Dinosaurs, some weird Escape Room card game, and two PackOGames: Bus and Boo), and I felt like Boo would be a good fit.  It's another of the PackOGames series, games with cards the size of sticks of gum, packaged with the clever "PackOGames" (instead of pack of gum) name.  Our previous favorite was Dig, which was described here .   We only got to play Boo one time through.  Basically, the cards are divided into three sets based on the color of the tick marks: black, white or green.  The green cards are used to build the initial gateway to the graveyard, an exact pattern that you always start with.  Each card had three spaces, with either a black ghost, a white ghost or a tombstone.  The basic idea is that you place one card on the board each turn, touching any other card, and then each ghost on

Chemistry games: Org Chem Adventure

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Org Chem Adventure by NinDiMo really did manage to make a game with chemistry content.  It's a text-based adventure game that follows a kid in search of his father who never returned from a trip to a weird land of chemical landscapes. It does show a few chemical formulas but I would not consider it overly technical. The story itself is oddly original and fantastical/abstract.  You do get to choose some dialog paths.  There are some sensible chemistry puzzles, like betting on which of the listed chemical is more acidic.  Of course you can scroll up a page or two to find the reference guide in the conversation before it. It was a bit annoying that nobody in this world thought anything of a chemist until they are proclaimed to be wizards and then they are worth rescuing. And then it cuts off suddenly. It hasn't been updated since 2017 but I felt it was worth a mention for being different from the rest of the quiz-based apps I have seen.

Chemistry Games: Molecule Makers

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Molecule makers appear to be the most common class of chemistry-related games on the Android.  There are a lot of games where the challenge is to build specific molecules.  These have a range of styles and difficulty levels, and it is a more informative pasttime than just answering quiz questions.   "Molecule - a chemistry puzzle" (by a.mighty.dish) is very stylish and combines molecule making with an attractive spatial puzzle.  You have to navigate the atoms together in the limited niches provided.  It has not been updated since 2018. Chemistry Lab (by Monster Brain Educational Games) has a few different molecule maker levels.  The first mode is Classic where the atoms come dripping down the three tubes up above and you have to catch only the correct ones in the big beaker.  That's fun for a while.   The next level (Covalent Bonds) has you draw the bonds between atoms to meet certain goals.  Aside from one goofy typo ("Carbon di Oxide") it has some learnin

Chemistry Games: the Elements

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The most basic part of chemistry is knowing the elements.  There are a lot of games that show elements or ask about elements, or talk about them. First up is Atomas, which puts elements in a circle and has some odd logic to combine them.   I am showing a tutorial page because it helps illustrate the kind of moves available. Next comes Chemistry Game (by Orange Unit) which is a neat slider puzzle with elements for tiles.  But neither of these needed to use actual elements ... they would not be any different if they used plain numbers instead.  In fact Orange Unit has the same game skinned with numbers and alphabets. Periodic Table Battle (by Wipoo Chatwranon) is literally just choosing from two element names each round to shoot the alien/whatever, and it even had a typo in the very first element I saw, poor Hydrogne.  Sure, it's good to know the element symbols, and in a pinch you could easily confuse thallium and thulium.  But there is no "game" here, just repetitio

Chemistry Games: Intro

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About a year ago, when I wrote about the chemistry games I had as a kid ( Chem Rummy and Disintegration ), I went looking for some apps for my tablet or phone which were sensible chemistry games.  They are not easy to find.  They seem to fall into two categories of play: quizzes (flash cards, etc) with limited gameplay or flashy nonsense chemistry (mad scientist stuff).  Most look like personal or hobby projects, which I always like to check out.  Some are obviously meant for kids, which is good, and sometimes the kid stuff is more fun.  So let's see what I have found so far.  I am looking in the Google Play store for apps with ratings of at least 3.5.  I will be splitting this into topics for the next few posts. What I would like to see: I would like to see a commercial-quality game where you have complex, real-world crafting trees.  I did some drafts of games of this wort when I was building web-based apps.  It's not that hard to make a tech tree with real compo

Dino diggers for kids: Archaeologist

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While looking for more dino digger games to compare, I found quite a few that were meant for kids.  One I felt was worth showing was Archaeologist: Jurassic Life, but it goes under several other names as well.  It starts with a cartoon intro, then lands here: It has the basics of the dino diggers for grown-ups without all the numbers and levels and purchases.  You get to go to a dig site, but this time you get all the bones for a dino, some kid voices say "Yay!" And then you go to a lab table to piece it together. This page is a very clean implementation that reminded me of the item drag interface of Art Story. When completed you get the fact sheet... Aside from that,  there is a page of simple dino jigsaw puzzles. When completed they move around a bit and chomp food you give them.  This is well balanced for kids, and you can unlock all content for $3.49. There isn't enough depth for adults but I found it interesting looking at the differences. 

Dino diggers: Dino Quest 2

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Dino Quest 2 is the sequel to Dino Quest, which I described in my last post.  This is a huge step up in terms of features and interface and level progressions.  You still start on a map and unlock new dig sites with coins and levels. The dig site looks more like Minecraft than any of the other dino diggers I have looked at so far.  Which is fine and familiar. Once you find some bones, you go to the lab where you have a limited staff of scientists, and each scientist can only work on one crate at a time.  The first creates take 15 seconds to open, others take 4 minutes 10 seconds, or longer.  There are three tiers of bones: 1 star, 2 star and 3 star.  Each bone can either be new, or better quality than the bone on your specimen, or a duplicate, or sent to research.  Either way, you get some amount of coins, xp, and specimen research points each time. One thing I really like is that each species has an upgrade tree based on its research points.  At 80 DNA, you get a base with plaque, at

Dino diggers: Dino Quest

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Here is another dino digger game.  This one is Dino Quest by the prolific Tapps Games, makers of over two dozen "Evolution" games, makeover games, themed cooking games, and more. Here, you start off with a world map, zoom in on a continent (starting on Australia), then tap the ground and use radar signals (hot, hotter, hottest) to find dig sites. Then you get to a dig site where you get 150 taps to break rocks looking for bones.  There are more powerful tools available for coins.  From what I have seen so far, your museum is just a panel for each continent and a side-scrolling set of skeletons.       This is a fairly old game that happily advertises their new Dino Quest 2 version, which I will be covering soon.

Doctor Who Fluxx

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I have covered other Fluxx games here before.  A while back I prematurely bought the Doctor Who themed Fluxx pack.  I say prematurely, because at that time, Anne (my #1 gamer) had never seen an episode of Doctor Who.  Over the summer, we watched Guardians of the Galaxy on a friday movie night, and I remember talking about where we all knew "the blue girl" from.  Karen Gillan, you know, Amy Pond from Doctor Who.   Nope.  So we watched all the Matt Smith episodes (except the last two, saving those for later), then started on David Tennant season 2, but after the Face of Boe came up I figure we just need to see them all from the start of the NuWho.  So, we've now watched almost all of season 1-7.  On the side, I watched a season and a half of Peter Capaldi (why is he so grumpy??) and the first season of Jodie Whittaker ...  Back to the card game.  We just saw the Planet of the Ood episode where the name Doctor Donna came up.  And I remembered we had this card game tucked awa

Picross Survival completed

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I got through all those 30x30 nonograms to finish Antarctica, which completed the game.  You get a little completed screen and 9 of 9 achievements and then I guess you can replay past levels or move on to something new.   Or go outside.  I hear it's nice out there.