ScottVee Gaming

We finally got around to playing "What's the Point" that we got a few weekends ago.  It's a pretty simple card game that felt a lot like a deck of Fluxx cards.   There are point cards, action cards, and character cards.  For 2-3 players, the first to collect 10 point cards is the winner.  The rules are short, and there is enough variety to get into some funny moments.  In general, you play as many action cards as you want during your turn, but any action that gets you points will end your turn, along with playing any card that says it ends your turn.  Otherwise, to end your turn you draw a new card.  If you start your turn with an empty hand, draw 3 cards.  You also get points by playing 3 of a kind of any of the 3 character cards, with wild cards to add some spice. The action cards just let you steal cards or points, or ask for a specific card, or Stop an action another player is taking.  It's funny getting into a Stop battle, where you...

We got Peace by Peace: Succulents a few weeks back at the Toy Box in San Clemente, CA on the way back from a weekend trip.  I also got the cactus-themed game "What's the Point" in that same batch, so it was an odd pair.  Two of the types of plants I used to grow back when I had space to grow things. Anyway, Peace by Peace is not really a game, it's a series of 50 puzzles.  There is a set of 45 triangle-shaped tiles with colored leaf patterns in each corner, then a set of 50 cards giving puzzles to be solved.  Each card list which numbered tiles to use and shows a few starting cards by their number, but not what position they're in, followed by some empty spaces and possibly the colors of a few other corners. The challenge is to work out how to complete the pattern using the tiles available.  It's a bit annoying finding those tiles to setup the puzzles, but we settled on stacking them in piles of 1-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39 and 40-45.  Then we could easily find...

We did a quick road trip through Ramona, CA today.  We stopped at a big estate liquidation place and found two old old games on one of the back shelves.  They were actually priced reasonably: the Game of Nations box was $10 and Hokum was $12.  A lot of times, the things that accumulate in antique shops have inflated prices, but this wasn't an antique shop and they were actually right in the range for a quick sale.  I might have paid $20 off the shelf.  The issue is, I would have to read the rules, figure out the correct number of cards and risk having missing cards.  If someone offered it online and took good photos and I knew all the cards were there, for game of that period I am actively seeking, I can do $50.  Prices are such subjective things. When I got home I immediately saw that Hokum was just a Bingo game, but it was from 1927 and in good shape.  It was still sealed at the store, and the packaging was tougher than the plastic used these da...

I finished Season 5 (Egypt).  The last battle was impressive, with Set starting at about 18K HP with the usual minions, after which he becomes a titan battle with about 60KHP, and as that was winding down with my guys getting very weak, he came back as a regular battle with anoth 13KHP.  I think I did the 75 gems to buy a second chance, but it was a good end-of-season adventure with some surprises. A few nights back, I got an event summons and came up with Heimdall, that really difficult opponent who blows his horn and heals allies above their normal max HP, AND can reincarnate fallen allies.  Now he's on my team 6, and I'm training him up to help with the alliance wars. Last night I got a few event summons again, and bought a few more for $5.99.  Got some new ones: lemur construct, treevil, and a bunch of really odd characters.  I later got 3 summons from coins at the end of the event and got two different gnomes and some kind of magical flamingo....

Empires & Puzzles added a new kind of event this week, the Monster Island.  I only saw the last hour of it, but the bits that I saw were a lot of fun.  You get a big hex map with your team members on various hexes, and challenges on other hexes.  There were action point you can spend to move to a new hex or battle the mobs on a hex.  Each mob challenge cycles you through 20 monsters.  New ones appear as the old ones are beaten, so it's a bit of a surprise at first and a scramble to keep up.  They don't come in fixed waves and don't seem to get any harder throughout.  Some of them have pretty silly names, but it's a fresh variety.  Each mob challenge costs about 20 more action points than the previous challenge. Judging from the chat comments, there were also titans on some of the hexes, but I did not see one.  The event was over before I could really get into it, but boy the loot was numerous. Each mob challenge dropped a certain number o...

I'm still hacking away on Empires & Puzzles before bed.  I have made it most of the way through those Season 5 levels in Egypt.  As a throwback to 1st edition D&D they have a hieracosphinx to fight, and Bastet is apparently a super-cute flying kitten in this universe, while Cleopatra is somehow frumpy and unattractive.  I'm gradually making my way through all the usual gods & heroes.  This season is very well put together, though the battles in each map get very redundant: 10 levels per map with 3 to 5 waves per level -- you get really tired of mummies after a few hours. I signed up with my old alliance again -- The Knights Who Say Nee -- and some of the names sounded familiar from a few years back.  I'm not sure why the alliance wars start at 6am on work days; I suppose the developers are in Europe somewhere.  The titans are annoyingly difficult, they're up to 10 or 11 stars these days, and I think the alliance gets 24 hours to do the full 3 or...

Rockhounding: Chemistry was a mod for Minecraft version 1.10.2 which had another solid set of chemical reactions to play with.  I hopped onto my VeeTech2 modpack world to refresh my memory (and notes) about it. Everything in this mod starts with the uninspected minerals found throughout the world.  You put these into the Mineral Sizer to get a huge range of minerals, but first you need some Lab Ovens to make some of the acids.  These all use composts which are made in the Lab Blender, so let's start there ... [Lab Blender] 3 S = 8 Sulfur-bearing compost (SComp), or coal blocks or coal coke blocks, there are variants for all of these that make different amounts [Lab Blender] 3 apatite = 4 fluorite-bearing compost (FComp) [Lab Blender] 3 salt = 4 NaCl compost (NaClComp) [Lab Blender] 3 coal = 4 Cracked Coal compost (CCComp) [Lab Blender] 3 Carbon dust = 2 Carbon compost (CComp) [Lab Oven] 1000mb H2O + SComp = 500mb H2SO4 [Lab Oven] 500mb H2SO4 + NaClComp = 300mb H...

The team at Mojang has put out some very elaborate April Fools snapshots in the past.  About 2 years back, they had that crazy update where you could throw written books into portals to generate new dimensions built from almost any block, so you could have a world of end ships floating over mountains of trapdoors.  That's still fun to revisit every now and then. This year they put out the "A or B" snapshot, jokingly called the Voting Update.  I suppose it's a spoof of their own annual vote events, where players get to vote for a biome or a mob to be developed.  Each time, we wonder, why not just put all 3 of those mobs in the game?  Seems like they would have the people power to do it. Anyway, in this snapshot, you are bugged every few minutes by a chat message saying some vote just started, then you hit the V key to open the vote window, which gives a few weird options.  Vote for one, done.  These options change just about everything in ...

After finding that tiny $1.25 edition of Monopoly at the Dollar Tree yesterday, and blogging about how comically small it was , the big question was ... is it playable? So we spent about an hour rolling the micro dice and moving our little colorform-on-plastic-disc pieces.  There was a rule where if you decline to buy a property it goes up for auction starting at $10.  This sounds like a more recent addition to force games to go faster.  We tried it.  We didn't like it.  When it works in your favor, great; if not, the other player got a $300 property for $40 because you couldn't afford it.  We don't keep our money secret either, so we could just look over an bid some amount we knew the other player couldn't match.  Meh. The tiny pieces were usable.  We had fun swapping tiny money for tiny property cards.  Sometimes it felt like the game was fine but our fingers were freakishly huge.   We could just barely (!) read the text on...

We stop at local Dollar Tree stores pretty regularly, looking for bits and pieces for crafting projects.  On our anniversary weekend trip to San Juan Capistrano, we saw the local Dollar Tree had a games section.  But what games came you really get for a buck?   It turns out, they now have little editions of Monopoly and Candy Land plus a bunch of little plastic pinball-type games and card games.  There's a cute version of Road Trip Bingo.  I can see doing a cheap version of Candy Land since it's just a board, some pieces and a few cards with colored squares on them.  Battleship was original a pencil and paper game, you don't even need a board to play it.  But Monopoly?  How the heck do you slim that down to $1.25 price point?  We had to get one and find out. Here it is: I put a dollar bill in the picture for scale.  Check out the micro money and mini micro dice. First of all ... ta da!  It's Colorforms fun!  That was an un...