ScottVee Gaming

Out of the blue, I found a reasonably good game app based on solving out family tree mysteries.  This is funny to me, because I did a lot of actual genealogy research in the past two months and Anne seems to enjoy watching the pieces come together. This "Family Tree! - Logic Puzzles" game by Lion Studios Plus is fairly basic, and spams you with ads at first.  After every puzzle, you get an ad.  I don't mind paying $4.99 to get rid of ads.  Unfortunately, there are still things you have to watch an ad to unlock, which really bugs me. Anyway, there are a few sections to look at.  In the basic game, you just click the next puzzle and try to figure out who is married to who, and where all the children go.  It starts off very simple and does get more complicated - sometimes it seems to leave out information, but just knowing X is the niece of Y is enough to get over the bump and finish the tree.  The writing is in very imperfect English in my version, but I always feel that tr

I got through all of the 32 cards needed to unlock the Delve mode, only to fine that the Delve mode isn't that different from the regular game, other than essentially counting how many hands in a row you can win.  So, you start at Delve Level 1 and need something like 10 coins and a win to move on to level 2.  With each level you need 5 more coins to progress.  I did make it to level 10 to meet one of the quests on the Quests page, then failed and dropped back to level 9. Tonight I lost more and sunk to level 5.  So, it's a long haul to move up and get past your personal best.  It would be nice if there was a high score of some kind, but just getting back up to level 10 has been a challenge, and I can see ahead to where level 18 might require a win and 100 gold to surpass.  And I almost never get more than 70 or 80 gold per hand.  I'm not sure level 20 could even be reached with a progression lke that. Looking at the Quests screen, it's a bit of a jumble.  I completed o

As I unlock the last features, I'm annoyed about the Hunting and Ocean Trading sections, since they're only open during weekdays from 9:30AM-6:30PM.  Since my job plus commute has me busy from 8:30AM-5:30PM, it leaves me only the one hour after work (when I'm really tired or having dinner) to try those things.  So I guess I won't be documenting those. Instead, I paid for month of Auto Fishing just to see how it works.  It is very similar to the chest automation.  Just pick a rarity and it will run through all the more common items and only ask you to decide when a fish of the selected rarity is found.  This was a little bit odd at first since I didn't realize the fish had a rarity class, but yes, their names are color-coded with the same ranks as other items. Actually, both automations run seamlessly together.  If you're on the Fishing page and you see "Chest Sprite Stopped", hop back to the main page to deal with the item, and if you're on the mai

It turns out that the chest clicking can be automated.  Click the gear icon under the chest.  If you choose "Rare or higher" from the top list, it will stop the automation to let you choose what to with items of those tiers, while auto-selling lesser items.  You can choose specific battle modifiers as well.  Then hit the Start button.  The chest will now automatically run through items, and when one that meets your criteria comes up it says "Chest Sprite stopped" and lets you click to examine the item as usual.  I like this mode better than manually clicking -- you get to see the actual items pop out of the chest. Note that the automated chest works in the background, so you can let it cycle through the items while you are on other screens doing other tasks. Boy, that would have saved a lot of time, if I had known about it sooner.  But some of those featurs unlock at specific chest levels, so it might not have been available until the last few levels anyway.  I ju

Well, I finally unlocked the Fishing section of Chest Hero after about 3000 clicks.  I don't know why so many games have a fishing module.  That's weird to me.  I have been fishing in Minecraft (with many mods that add even more fish), Black Desert, and a number of other hero-based games.  It's an odd phenomenon, especially when the fish give you magical buffs and boosts.  But there's also a lot about collecting groups of things in games, and fish provide an almost inexhaustible variety of things to find. For Chest Hero, the fishing area is a lot more detailed than we were expecting.   Your fishing gear has a few components that can all be upgraded: Pole, Bait, Line, Sinker, and Hook.  You use pearls to upgrade them, and get pearls from completing Orders as described below.  You can hide that main stats display by clicking the fish-shaped pull at the bottom left.   Click the pond to fish.  Pull in fish. And of course, the fish fall into different categories: small, medi

Your Wings can be upgraded and then tiered up, by spending gold and white feathers.  Beyond that there is a screen to Empower them, which I will have to explore more when I have more components to tinker with. By the way, the main chest pulsates once for each tier of item it's about to uncover.  If it opens right away, it will be Ordinary.  A second pulse means it's Uncommon, and so on. Level 53 to 54 takes 780 xp.  At this point I can go 15 to 30 picks without needing any of the items. Level 54 (clicked a lot during lunch break).   Task 114: accumulate chest upgrades 10 times. Task 115: accumulate chest upgrades 17 times. Task 116: accumulate chest upgrades 18 times. Task 117: accumulate chest upgrades 19 times. Task 118: accumulate chest upgrades 20 times. Task 119: reach level 58. That's an odd progression.  Skip 7, then 4 steps of trivial actions (already done), then 700 more clicks needed. I was wondering what the tiers above Legendary are, since I finally got one of t

Task 108 is Reach Level 45, and from 40 to 41 takes 470 xp and from 41 to 42 needs 490 Xp, so that's about 500 clicks to get from 40 to 45.  At level 40, the Knights Handbook rank 1 quest was completed, so I moved on to rank 2 "Iron Knight" and the next goals are: Treasure Chest level 8, Player level 70, Wings tier 1, and it looks like the bonus will be HP+500, ATK+125, DEF+50 and 10% more gold when selling items (though 10% of 5 coins is less than a coin).  Level 45 will also unlock World Boss 4. The Pets area unlocked, and I guess the Mounts area has been unlocked for a while but I just didn't notice it.    The Pets area is pretty detailed and has a 6 image tutorial the first time you go in there.  Essentially you have a 4x4 grid where you can place pets, though the bottom two rows start off locked.  There are 3 eggs at the bottom: you get free eggs every now and then on the first (white) egg icon, and can pay 150 gems for a class C pet at the second (green) egg, an

Gems, Inlaying and Crafting Starting around quest 82, there is a long series of quests that teach you how to get gems, inlay them and create gems.  To purchase gems, just click the gem icon, then Enter, then Purchase.  To Inlay gems, click Inlay and then try to fit your little tetris pieces into the 5x5 grid at top left.  There will be a task to "Inlay 3 gems" which I found very confusing.  It turns out that they mean to somehow fit 3 tetris-pieces into the grid.  After that, and buying more Gems, the quests say to Craft a Gem.  Under the Purchase button, a new Craft button appears, click that and drag three gems into the slots at the top.  The idea is to use three gems of the same tier to make one gem of the next tier up.  The higher-tier tetris-pieces are actually smaller so they can fit into smaller areas in the grid.  The gem combs give some additional buffs.  That's an interesting extra area to play around in.    The actual number of chest clicks needed to level up s

  As much as I like the Card Crawl app with its streamlined deck of battle cards, I have had a hard time trying to figure out the more elaborate Card Crawl Adventures.  It's very similar, with a lot of the same card graphics, but it has been expanded to a world map full of taverns with different parameters, each leading to a table with a 3x3 grid of cards.  It looks like you are supposed to select some path through those cards, spending an action point for each card, and possibly taking HP damage along the way.  But the cards have a lot of text and symbols on them, and it's not clear to me what the outcome is going to be.   Overall, for each tavern you have 3 goals: defeat a set number of mobs, defeat the boss, and get the treasure.  There are cards for all of these, and a card to leave the maze.  At the end it will remind you whether you met all the objectives, but I didn't pay much attention to whatever points or rankings it used.  But I don't get the mechanics of why

Chest Hero did a big update around 9/5, and among other things it added were a set of mini games.  You can get to these from the top icons, click on Trials.  The games are: 1. Tame the Pets   I don't recall ever seeing this game mechanic before.  You have to cut ropes so the pets will drop down to you, but it takes a few seconds for the pets to walk to you, and you have to have enough levels to tame them when they reach you or they kill you instead.  So you can't just do a straight cut across all the ropes, or they will all come down at the same time.  You end up having to add some swirls to delay the sword -- it slowly follows the path you draw, so you have to draw it in a way that it will drop to low level pet first, then delay as much as needed for that pet to reach you before dropping the next one.  Interesting.  And it's intuitive enough that after two or three fails you should get the hang of it with no tutorial needed.  It turns out there is a limit to how long the p

When I first tested Chest Hero, it felt like there wasn't much to do.  You just click on the big chest and get a piece of equipment and either it's better than what you've got (equip it) or worse (sell it).  Then there is the usual Adventure section, where you get really really REALLY dull combats where one guy zooms over to hit the other guy and they go back and forth, AND by level 1-5, I lost every battle.  So there wasn't much going on.       Then I bought the $0.99 "special gear", because it was a cute cat helmet, and the little boost made a huge difference.  It turns out that better gear can add little powers, so now in the battles my guy might hit twice or stop to heal, making it start to feel like a contest.  I could clear a few more adventure levels and it felt like it was going somewhere.  An important driver of the game is the little quest box right above and to the left of that big chest.  It tells you what your next objective is.  Maybe you need to

This game looked like a logic grid game at first, but it turns out it's more of a graphical Sudoku puzzle.  The levels start off with a 5x5 grid and 5 icns you have to place on the map.  Each row or column can only have a single icon.  The bottom of the screen has the key to what can go where, and you can click each of those hints to get an explanation for what the graphics are trying to tell you.  Maybe the spyglass goes on a desert space and the chest cannot be adjacent to a volcano. You can view the tutorial to see how the controls work, how you can put placeholders on the map to help you eliminate wrong choices. Scrolling through the various screens, it looks like these can get very complicated.  Some of the later puzzles have 6x8 to 8x8 maps with multiple colors of icons, where each color has the "one icon per row/column" rule, essentially two puzzles overlaid on the same space.  So there are definitely some challenges here.  It's just not a type of game that n

I spent a long afternoon in an E.R. waiting room over the weekend and poked away at the Card Quest app to help pass the hours.  It's an interesting little game, and I can now beat it about 3 times out of 4, but I'm not sure I can articulate an actual strategy for it. Overall, you get cards that are either swords, shields, monsters, coins, potions, or special abilities.  The values on the cards range from 2 to 10.  Special ability cards don't have a value, but you can long-press them to see what effect they will have.  You have a hot bar with your character and three other slots: left hand, right hand, and backpack.  You drag swords and shields onto the left or right hand to equip them.  From there, drag swords onto monsters to damage or remove them, or drag monsters onto shields to represent their attacks on you -- any points in excess of what the shield can handle are subtracted from your player, who starts with only 13 hp.  Drag potions onto either hand to heal by that nu

This is a surprisingly effective series of puzzles where you travel to different buildings and towns to rescue 10 cats per level.  Comically, if we were just getting coins for solving each puzzle, it feels like this would get old quickly, but having that funny cat pop out from various angles and then meow as you vortex him back to the future is just perfect. The developer has come up with such a variety of puzzles, that's a job well done.  As you rotate the buildings and look around, there are a lot of hints etched onto walls or signs that gives a color sequence or number/letter code for a puzzle embedded somewhere in the level.  Almost every puzzle is intuitive enough that no verbal explanation is needed.  You rotate dials or drag blocks and levers, or add pieces to get machinery to work.  It wasn't until about level 15 that we finally found a puzzle that made no sense, and the "tip" ran so quickly we couldn't follow it. Some of the puzzles have multiple steps, l