ScottVee Gaming

I took some PTO so we had a four-day weekend.  As we were puttering around Encinitas, CA we found a copy of San Marcos Opoly.  Backtracking a bit, 2 or 3 weekends ago we relisted our stack of extra board games again on NextDoor, and ended up selling Masterpiece to someone who worked at USAOpoly, the maker of so many of these locally themed Monopoly clones. It turns out that San Marcos Opoly was not from that company, but was made by ___ in ____ instead. I get the attraction of these, since the original game used streets of Atlantic City which most of us have never seen.  So it was fun seeing our local places like Money Pit and the Palomar "P" on the board.  But there are hundreds of these clones on the market now and it just looks like the world gone crazy. The game itself was Monopoly with the spaces renamed and different cards.  There were two cards we saw that were unlike anything in the original game: one has you roll a die and move backward that many spaces...

I bought Azul about a year ago, but after opening it I thought it might have too many pieces or too many rules to fit our comfort zone.  It certainly is a vibrant and gorgeous design with nice thick pieces to collect. It's not as complicated as I thought.  Like usual, our first run through was a stripped-down version, and then I add one or two other rules each time we play again.  Azul didn't need much of that treatment.  You basically have a game board with about 8 panels and a guy marking which panel you're on.  You try to collect the glass pieces you need from the central "factory".  You can only add to one pane in a turn.  If you complete a pane, you put a piece on the track below it and score all completed panes from there to the right, then flip the pane over.  The second time, you score and remove the pane entirely. Your marker shows your current pane, and you can only place pieces on panes from that pane to the right, never to the left of ...

It looks like the tournaments in IPM start on Fridays and run through the weekend.   I figured I was going to need some kind of paid boost to have any hope,  so I did splurge for the merchant ship (x2 to all values) and did some tapjoy tasks to get a few cash windfalls.  I was able to reach the #2 spot early on,  but after being away for a few hours I dropped down to #8, then #11... and now after dinner and some distractions I am at the #17 slot with a galaxy value of $3.54B.  The top guy has a value of $2.01T or nearly 1000 times my points.  So it still looks like ranking high enough to matter in one of the tournaments is either a full time job or a commitment of a lot of real dollars.  Although there are probably players with speed boosts of 10 or 20 times what I have reached, a difference of x1000 is a bit much.  Jan 2 update: I ended up in 18th place and got no energy cells,  but I did get 8 resource stars, 50 day matter and promoted...

Continuing the tale of my previous post ... We had about 40 minutes before ball dropped on New Year's Eve, and the egg nog was actually some kind of throat-burning rocket fuel, so someone grabbing the little cylinder of Zombie Dice. This is such a quick and simple filler game, I'm surprised I don't have a copy at home.  Basically, you pick three dice and count the brains.  When the first player reaches 13 or more brains, everyone gets one last round to try and beat the highest score. But every game needs a balancing act of numbers and forces.  In this case, the dice also have shotgun blasts and footprints.  You can keep rolling, but if you get a third shotgun blast in a round, all points gained in that round are lost.  You reroll three dice each time, including any footprints from the previous roll.   So, if you had two footprints, you grab one new die from the can plus the two footprints already rolled, and those are the three dice you roll. The secon...

Every New Year's we get together at a friend's house, hang out by the grill outside and talk, game for a while and watch the ball drop.  For privacy reasons, I don't share names, but a big thanks to the long-time gamer group for inviting us back.  It's actually the second and third generation of the gaming group that started with D&D over 30 years ago.  They still have a regular D&D campaign most saturdays but I can't really commit to year-long adventures these days.  So when there's a chance to play one-off games, count me in. By the time we got there, they were wrapping up a game of Apples to Apples.  But we all got to the table for a 2-hour stretch of Cards Against Humanity, my least favorite game in the world.  It's just stacks of cards saying unspeakable, gross, awkward things, but sure, when it comes up it's worth taking a deep breath and playing along.  There are a lot of laughs and groans, but also a quantity of mutual suffering.  ...