ScottVee Gaming

Here's an odd tangent into the world of games ... there's a country store a few exits up the highway from where we live, and they have a really odd diversion to get customers to come back. As you walk in, there's this quaint sign challenging you to find Millie the Cow, which is a little plastic toy that they move around the store from day to day.  So, it's a kind of scavenger hunt.  Very simple, but when we're in the area we just think, "Let's stop and find that little cow again."  So we scour the shelves, finding some groceries we need along the way (so it succeeds are a marketing trick), and it's just fun looking for the thing.  I don't know why, but we almost start whispering, like it can somehow hear us and hide.  That's nuts.  It's a tiny plastic cow.  But here she is, hiding in the pickle relish ... FOUND IT! So we go up to the counter and tell them where we found Millie.  And they have to offer us a lollipop, but neither of us ca

Lottery tickets are an interesting kind of non-game.  I got a few Scratchers today as an odd holiday challenge, and I have to start off by saying I do NOT recommend buying these Scratchers for any reason.  They are designed to tickle any kind of gambling genes you might have.  They give you the illusion of choice, make you feel like you almost won, and give minimal wins to make you feel like you have more of a chance than you actually do. They are not games by any stretch of the imagination, but they do a good job of capturing the iconography of games and social trends.  These crossword and bingo styled cards give you a set of letters or numbers that you have to scratch off, and in the end you have to count how many words you made (or some other pattern) to see if you "won" or not.  These cards really make you work for it.  Along the way you feel like you are actually playing a game, but you are just unveiling the things that were already printed on the card when you bought i

I got Land vs Sea a few months ago but we never had a chance to try it until yesterday.  It looked like a pretty simple tile-placing game, and sure enough, that sums it up.  Each player has two tiles in their hand, and each tile is two sided.  So you have 4 patterns you can play.  Some have a symbol to play again, and some have a symbol to steal a tile from another player.  Otherwise, each turn you play a tile and try to complete a land or sea area, depending on which side you're playing. To actually capture some areas is a lot trickier than you might think.  After a while, I found myself counting how many land edges or sea edges I need to complete each area.  But sometimes, just having the land-land-sea-land edges you need doesn't mean the tile solves the problem for you.  That piece of land of arm of the sea might escape in a new direction. When you do complete an area, you get one point for each tile the area appears on, plus one point for any of the black (land) or white (s

With a subtitle like "Smile, the End is Near," it's pretty easy to guess the tone of Happy Little Dinosaurs.  But I guess if they called it Sad-Ass Mopey Dinosaurs Who Are Totally Doomed, it would be a hard sell. It's a cute idea, and the cards all have sad dinosaurs.  They are very well drawn with a solid and likeable art style.  And most of the cards have pretty funny blurbs explaining the actions and disasters they show. Gameplay was simple.  Each turn you turn over a disaster card, then each player plays an action card face down.  Flip those cards together.  The player with the highest card gets the points shown on the card, but the player with the lower points gets to add the disaster card to their character folio -- they also get the points on their action card and one point for each disaster card they own.  Because, as the game says, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The goal is to be the first to move your dino-meeple up to space #50 on your folio.

What can you say about Uno, except that you match the color or number on the card at the top of the discard pile and try to get rid of all your cards first?  Sure, there are a few others cards: Reverse does nothing with just two players, but Skip will skip the next player and +2 skips them and also makes them draw 2 cards.  There is a Wild that matches any color.  The Wild +4 matches and makes the next player draw 4 cards, but you can only play it if you have no valid match, otherwise the target player can challenge you and if they catch you bluffing you're the one who has to draw cards. We got a pack of Minecraft Uno cards at a $5-and-under shop called Five Below, and the cute characters made it a little more fun to play than the usual solid colors.   Rather than calling out numbers, we would call out Sheep, Wolf, Wolf, Creeper ... which was odd but hard to resist. The box itself was full of tiny text, mostly in Spanish, and lots of logos, that I wrote about in my "Odd Signs

Idle Planet Miner posted an update this morning (12/21), where the main new addition is a Space Station near the center of the map.  The Space Station has a tree of new goals and powers based on energy cells, which you win in Tournaments.  Now, I have never seen a Tournament screen in the game, but it sounds like this is the bottom icon which issues a challenge to sell your galaxy and see how fast you get back up to a million.  That Challenge screen says nothing about energy cells, though.  So that wasn't very well rolled out. Still, I've been thinking of selling my galaxy again anyway, since there's not much left to build or research.  I've already hit the very last smelter recipe and last crafter recipe. Let's see ... my galaxy value is $49.78Q, which is worth 1235 credits (x2 if I use 100 of the dark matter than I just got through playing Dice Dreams on Tapjoy).  Double the credits for 2470.  Click the Sell button.  Step one is new rooms.  Dorms give Crafting pri

After a holiday gathering with the annual Gift Exchange/Steal, we sat down for a few hands of Exploding Kittens, which I have never actually played before.  I've seen the cards, but the grotesque art was not my cup of tea.  Sure, there are some funny puns in there, but there's also a guy barfing in another guy's mouth.  But what's important is the gameplay, and it was devious and hilarious. It's so simple ... the deck is seeded with enough Exploding Kitten cards for all but one player, and if you draw an Exploding Kitten card, you're out of the hand.  You can defuse it with a Defuse card, otherwise, the only way to survive is to avoid drawing cards.  Use the Skip card to skip your turn, or an Attack or Targeted Attack card to make another player take two turns.  You can See the Future to look at the top 3 cards but not rearrange them, so you can plan a better move.  Or use Alter the Future to actually rearrange those cards and give yourself a safe c

One of the board games in the 100-game pack I mentioned in my previous post was the classic Game of the Goose which I've covered in an artic le from last year . It's always fun to see these boards -- there's always some twist ... different numbers which mean different things. In this case it's the only time I've ever seen the game of the goose with no actual geese on the board.  Okay,  one Goose.  Really?  You're supposed to land on the geese and double your move.  Since there were so few geese we decided that any space with any kind of poultry counted as a Goose. Yeah, it worked.   The  board was also missing the classic space that sends you back all the way to the beginning. Usually there's one of these go back to the start spaces about four boxes before the end of the board so when you overshoot the end you go back four, land on a go all the way to beginning space and it's hilarious.  It also didn't mention the near universal rule that when you l

We went to a store called Five Below today and it turned out they had a really good selection of basic games; mostly smaller editions all priced at $5 apiece. Let's see ... we got Uno Minecraft edition, Sushi Go, a small box version of Jumanji, a box of 100 games in one, and a cheap edition of Candyland. That was a pretty good haul. Candyland is a kid's game without any of the normal appeal of a kid's game.  It's so simple it's hardly even a thing. You just draw a cards -- the cards have a color or two colors or a piece of candy on it -- the color cards you move either the one or the two spaces of that color forward, or if you get a cake or candy card then you have to move to that spot whether it's before or behind you. That's pretty much the whole game ...  just race to the end. There are a few shortcut spaces but that is literally all there is in that particular game. We tried to make it a bit more fun by dealing out three cards and then instead of moving

Dino Diggers 2 had an update (1.21) about two weeks back.  The only change that took getting used to was that you don't get xp right away for adding bones to your skeletons.  You have to go to each of your museum rooms and look for dinos with an xp icon above their heads.  The xp amounts may have also changed a bit, since I just got 160 xp and 5 gems for completing my ankylosaurus, bringing me up to level 8.  The new dig site is Ukothalwa Plains, which costs 180,000 to dig, and the research time has oddly dropped back down to 20 minutes for those crates from 30 minutes at the previous dig site.   Other than that, the update tweaked some minor things.  Some information boxes are better organized now.  I would like to be able to buy more of the 10-minute speed ups in the lab, but I guess since you can already spend gems to unlock individual crates, it's not needed.  It's hilarious how the tourists come in just dripping with coins. I wanted to point out some things

Tortuga looked like a fun game on the box, and when you open it up there's just a deck of ships and a deck of treasures and a booklet with rules in 5 languages.   I'm a fan of simplicity, so let's give it a spin.  For two players, the short version of the rules is: Setup: Deal 6 ship cards to each player, and lay out 5 treasure cards on the table. Play: Take turns choosing two ships and play them face down.  All players flip their ship cards at the same time.  Now, the highest numbered ship chooses one treasure card, next highest takes the next, then the next, and the player with the lowest card gets the two remaining treasures.  The only real twist here is that if you take a bomb you are expected to give it to the other player. The treasures have a variety of scoring rules.  The necklaces form a group, so one scores 1 point, two score 2, three score 5, four score 10 and five score 15.  Emerald plus diamond is worth 6, they score nothing on their own.  Crowns and bombs are

We've had the Pop Tarts card game for about a year now and did try it once before.   All I remembered was that it had an interesting way of handling cards. So with a rainy day and nowhere to go we pulled it out again.  Overall, you collect Pop Tarts from the cards on the table and put them on your plate as either toasted or cold, and try to match the combos shown on the goal cards for extra points.  The layout looks complicated but it makes sense once you've tried a hand or two.   There is a main spread of 7 cards and an arrow card saying which way the conveyor belt is going right now.  You can only take the card at the end where the arrow is pointing.  After you take the card, you move the next 3 cards over one in the arrow direction and deal a new card in the middle spot.  Above that main layout are the the current goals.  These might need 3 specific cards (hot or cold) or specific colors of hot and cold cards to get those extra 5 points.  You have a small hand of 3 action ca

I was a bit surprised when I spent a few $q to unlock new smelter and crafting recipes in Idle Planet Miner only to see that I reached the very last ones.  Check this out: I have been accumulating all the recipes, planet data and researches in spreadsheets along the way, and will try to put those into some Google Docs to attach to this blog soon.  Of course, there are fine wikis out there where teams have put together all this info.  I just enjoy composing my own guides.  And a big caveat would be that any prices or numbers of ingredients would be what I see on-screen based on whatever crazy modifiers I have at the time.  I have no way to access the raw unmodified numbers, but you would probably have about the same modifiers by the time you get to that point in the game anyway. There are still about 10 planets and 6 researches to unlock, and then I am done.  Of course, this is all for the version I am running right now.  I can sell my galaxy and start again, maybe unlock these last bit

I looked at this one for a while at the store before buying it.  Deckscape: the Mystery of Eldorado called itself an escape game in a single deck of cards, and I was curious how that would also work.  Another attraction was that it could be played solo.   It turned out to be a deck that must be played from the first card to last without shuffling or peeking.  It also had a "secret" dossier that cannot be opened until the cards say to open it.  That's interesting, but is it playable? With a lot of clever design work, yes, this was a fun little adventure.  The story is a very tired trope, but it packed a lot of puzzles and questions into the hour or so that it took to play.  It felt more like a "choose your own adventure" game than an escape room game.  There were a few places where the deck gets split into two or three sequences of cards, and technically different players could work on different parts of the story together.  As a cooperative game, the players all

DragonWar is a classic RPG card game from Robert A. Kraus (also known as RAK) from about 1989.  It was a deck builder game before deck builder games really caught on.  And a kind of board game generator before that was a thing either.  Bob is one of the true good guys in the industry, and we used to get together ever year around ComicCon, including the year where I was helping him at his dealer table and I got grossly ill and vanished.  He's still doing cons with as much energy as ever, updating fans on Facebook as he goes from city to city.  He can sketch any of these characters any time, and at least 100 more, cranking out custom signed art cards on demand, baking weird resin creatures at home by the gross, you name it. DragonWar was pioneering in that each card has three squares of a game board printed on them, so laying out the cards creates a fresh new game board layout each time you play.  Combine that with all the available expansions, and I have to say we had a lot of fun w