ScottVee Gaming

I have been looking at reviews and descriptions of a lot of board games that were tie-ins to TV shows from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and most of them are so generic they're hardly worth mentioning. A more quirky game is the Happy Days game from 1976.  Here is the BoardGameGeek page .  And here are the guys at Board Game Archaeology covering it.  But I want to head back to the Javascript board games page over here , since I couldn't find anyone doing an actual playthrough. The JavascriptBoardGame team has done another nice clean implementation.   Sure, you roll the dice and move around the board, but there are some twists that make it fun to play.  First of all, the overall goal is to get 16 Cool Points -- these are scored by moving your peg around the jukebox at top right.  You have a few dollars to spend along the way.  One fun spaces is "Hey Nerd" where Fonzie calls you a nerd, so you lose a cool point.  On the "Sumthin' To Do" spaces and "C...

Here's a game that doesn't fall into any of the categories I talked about last time.  Just when I thought I had worked out a good set of labels to help split all the subtopics.  While I have no interest at all in golf, I always got a kick out of miniature golf.  Just don't take it so seriously ... get some fresh air, putt the ball around, and enjoy yourself. For us, half the fun of miniature golf is the meta-game of people watching.  See how many different ways other people approach the same problems.  See parents showing their kids a thing they enjoy, and how some kids love it, some kids cheat every chance they get, and there's always a kid who gives up by Hole 12 and has a tantrum.  Then there are the young couples on dates, sometimes just laughing and being supportive, sometimes more competitive and mean to each other and you wonder why they're even together.  We also saw two groups of three or four men: one group who were screwing with each other, ...

Here's a game that's as old as I am.  I don't remember the Milton the Monster show, but like almost every TV show from the past half century, it has a board game.  It's not easy to find, but there's a website that finds these old games and makes them playable online with Javascript.  The site is here . This team does good work.  The game is not that exciting, just a roll and move race game.  But the developers made the spinner spinnable, and added a few sound effects for fun, especially the little sound gag when you win the game. The somewhat interesting elements of this game are: you are playing two discs, and when you land on an opponent you send the opponent backwards to the closest white space, so you can force them to lose a turn or whatever. So until you get one piece to the end, you get to choose which piece to move to avoid the bad spaces.  To win, you have to get both discs to the final space by exact count.  Once one piece is at the final spa...

Odds are, some of my readers only want to see posts about board games and others are more interested in the phone app games.  I rarely get out to actual arcades, but when I do, those games are just as much a part of game history as any of the others.  So I sometimes include those.  Here is an odd little niche game that's not really a game at all: the coin push arcade games. These are huge on YouTube.  You can find thousands of videos of people filming every minute of the "action".  There are fun moments but the rest is like watching paint dry.  It's not a game where you get to make choices other than when to hit the button.  All of the arcade games these days are essentially just pasttimes that convert the credit on a game card into "tickets" on the card, but I like the meta-game of finding the games where I get the most minutes of entertainment for those credits. There are a lot of different types of coin push games.  The one shown here is themed...

We stopped at the Mulligan Fun Center in Temecula CA on the way home from our trip.  We enjoy just about every kind of game, and how games cross our lives in other ways.  So stopping at a family fun center and trying out all the games is just another kind of gaming.  About the only kind of gaming we DON'T do is casino gaming or gambling. Skee-Ball is a favorite, because it is so simple.  Just roll the bowl up the ramp to where it jumps and has various targets to land in.  I don't really care about the score, or how many tickets come out.  It's just fun hitting a few of the better holes. Some years ago, a kind of virtual bowling game started appearing in these fun centers.  The one we show here is called "Lane Master".  I like the smoothness of the transition from real-world to on-screen balls.  Really, you are just rolling a ball a short distance, and it falls into a groove and comes back, but the screen detects where the ball hits and puts t...

Of the games in that 8-pack we got this weekend, it looks like the original owner just took out the Uno deck and donated the rest so we could get them.  The pack also included Uno Flip, which I wanted to take a look at.  I always felt that Uno could use some expansions, but since it's most entertaining cards -- the Reverse -- is useless in two player games, and we almost never have more players, we rarely play. What's the twist in Uno Flip?  There's a Flip card, and one side of the deck is colored differently.  So, when you play the Flip card, you flip the deck and everyone flips their hands.  That sounds fun, but the only difference on the "dark side" is that the Draw One card is now a Draw Five card.  Really?  That's the only thing they could think of?  Okay, they also changed the Skip card to a Skip Everyone cards, but that would play the same either way in a two-player game. Mad Gab was interesting in a surprising way.  And after reading ...

Of the games in that 8-pack we got this weekend, three of them were so similar I will group them together for speed.  They are Blink, Bold, and Common Threads.  What's funny is that, if we had not also bought Set for the first time this weekend, it would not have been as obvious how similar these games are. I get it, big game companies want to offer a variety of games at various difficulty levels, and there have always been card games where you match various symbols in various patterns.  But these three just felt like slightly simpler versions of Set with either a different theme or one of the matching criteria removed for less brain drain. Blink has color, number and shape.  Bold has shape, size and pattern.  We haven't played those yet, they went into a box for some other day.  But we did play through Common Threads because it looked quirky Common Threads has a colorful cartoony character on every card.  You start by splitting the deck among all play...

Of all the games we tested out at the hotel room today, our favorite was Monopoly Cats vs Dogs.  I almost never buy those Monopoly clones for cities, states, TV shows, and so on.  But this sounds like a slam-dunk theme.  How could you go wrong with cats vs dogs? It turns out, this game is from Parker Brothers itself, not from one of the companies that normally make the clones.  The unboxing was fun.  The game pieces were (of course) cats and dogs, and the property cards now have cats on one side and dogs on the other.  The board has only 8 spaces per side, and every set of cards has just two cards.  There are no railroads or utilities, and the Chance and Community Chest cards are now cat cards and dog cards.  Instead of hotels, you "mark your territory" with little fish (for the cats) or dog bones (for the dogs). So the game feels familiar, but it is more friendly, since you're not trying to drive the other players bankrupt, and the math is minima...

Here's one I got a while back, tucked into an old box of The Game of Nations.  (See previous post.) The rules and history can be found here: https://healthy.uwaterloo.ca/museum/VirtualExhibits/CardGames/LostHeir/index.html Check out the page at BoardGameGeek: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5670/lost-heir Judging from their edition/photo gallery, mine is the 1908 Milton Bradley set. Anyway, we finally got a chance to sit down and play a few hands.  It's a classic trick-taking card game, so common from that era (1890s to 1940s).  They are not my favorite types onf card games, partly because they play best with four players and we never have four.  I was wondering how the theme would play out, since we're technically playing police personnel searching for a Lost Heir.   The game play starts with a bid and a dealer who chooses a trump suit.  In this case we tried calling the trup suit the HQ, but kept calling it the trump suit anyway.  Then each trick...

Here is another game that is so simple it's complicated.  It's an interesting case story of a tiny set of rules that's just filled with holes.  It lead to a lot of incomplete moments. How simple is it?  There's a deck of big cards with detailed, cluttered (and VERY weird) drawings with lots of things in them.  You deal 5 cards to each player then somehow choose a starting word (rules gap).  We did this by truning over the next card, and the first person who says a words, that's the starter word.  Then, players just look at their cards and try to find a word for something in the picture that BEGINS with the LAST letter of the last word played. But here's what actually happened: too many words end in E, and we can't find any words for that, so I started just pointing out an eye and saying EYE, but then we were stuck with another E- word.  Technically, you can't repeat a word that has already been used, but we could have said EYEBALL the next time.  ...

I first heard about the card game Set about 20 years ago.  The cards looked so harmless but it had a certain word-of-mouth notoriety for being a brain teaser.  But why?  I finally bought a copy.  We already had Five Crowns and Quiddler from the same designer. It sounds so easy.  Find 3-card matches from the tableau of 12 cards.  Each card has four attributes: color, shape, number and texture.  A match is a set of 3 cards where each of the four attributes is either all the same or all different.  So, you could have three green cards (same color), solid fill (same texture), numbered 1 2 3 (different numbers), and three same/different shapes, that's a match. The game recommends using the small starter deck to get started, which does not have the texture element.  Once you see the logic of that, mix both decks together, deal out a new set of cards, and start losing your mind.  It really does get complicated.  About 90% of the first hour...

This is an interesting game.  It fit my criteria of simple (only a few rules) yet tricky enough to want to keep trying to work it out.  Here, you get 16 tiles, which you layout in a 4x4 grid, and the two players each get a stack of 8 discs representing their family. Each tile has a combination of two symbols: one plant symbol (pine, cherry, iris or maple leaves) and one foreground item (poem scroll, bird, sun or rain).  Players take turns taking a tile and placing one of their discs there.  The rules are: the first tile can be any one from the edge of the board (not the center four), and after that the tile you take must have match one of the two symbols from the last piece taken. The goal is to get 4 of your discs in a row, or 4 in a 2x2 square, or block the other player from having any path to succeed. That's it.  Simple.  But it was a neat puzzle working out the pattern and starting to see which moves are good and which moves are not helpful.  As an...

We were on a weekend away from home.  What we like to do is get away to a town 50-100 miles away, get a hotel room as a base of operations, and explore the thrift shops and game shops in the area to see what odd games we can find. We were not expected a downpour lasting hours, but we went out anyway.  I picked Orange CA for this weekend expedition.  I covered the Tiddywinks game shop in my previous post.  Today (Sunday) we went over to Tustin Ave and found nothing at the first thrift shop, but there was a good wall of games at the Orange Lutheran Thrift Shop. We found these: Monopoly Cats vs Dogs, CSI Miami, Sherlock Holmes puzzle game, and The Inventors. Then we got to the Salvation Army shop in the very next strip mall and got doused again, but they had an even bigger game section.  Most of what you find at these places are very common, very generic games like Life, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit ... bleah.  The trick is to find the unusual ones.  We came...

Tiddlywinks, Orange CA We stopped at a game shop in Orange CA today, named Tiddlywinks.  There was a sign out front about how they are open again -- it sounds like they just moved from a few doors away.  Their website is https://www.tiddlywinksoc.com  They had a fun variety of board games, a lot of toys and dolls, a stand of Little Golden Books (remember the Pokey Little Puppy), gags, novelty items, a back room of books for kids, and a lot of odds & ends.  It was a fun spot.  Interesting to see how every customer (whatever age) has some set of memories about these items.  Gaming is very much a part of our collective psyche. After about half an hour of comparing games, I ended up buying these: Set, Monopoly Card Game (different from the Monopoly card game we put in our own donation box recently), Niya, Toil & Trouble, Last Letter and "We Didn't Playtest This At All" -- I have no idea what that last one is, but it looked like blank cards full of smart...