ScottVee Gaming

On a trip to Tucson this week, we stopped at the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures .  It was so fascinating, with so many displays of different styles of miniatures, we ended up spending almost 3 hours gawking at them.  I was even inspired to write two poems capturing some of that feel.  But for my gaming blog I wanted to share this little gem: It was a poker table in a miniature house at what looked like the standard 1:12 scale.  I needed my glasses to see that the cards had details, and had to zoom in on my phone to see just how detailed they were.  The cards were barely 1 by 1.5 mm, yet the face cards were vibrant and realistic.  I looked for other games in other miniature exhibits, but this was the only one I saw.  Just another example of how games have always been a part of our lives, part of so many stories, so many evening gatherings. For fun, another exhibit was a re-creation of the famous "Dogs Playing Poker" painting:

We did a quick run through some thrift shops in Yuma on the way home from our trip.  The one that had the best selection of games was the Humane Society of Yuma Thrift Shop, although that was probably skewed by the fact the our top pick of thrift shops is usually humane society (who help needy animals), and maybe some charities that help needy humans. I came home with National Geographic Mission: Survival, Dysfunction, Ono-99 (a Uno variant), and Quiddler (which I didn't think we had a copy of, but we probably do). When we finally got home, I looked over the rules, cards, etc, and the first two look like they are going to be duds for us.  Mission: Survival has a gorgeous game board but is essentially a Trivial Pursuit with difficult geography questions that I would have no problem with, but Anne would not enjoy at all.  She won't know about the Ivory Coast or some specific fjord in Norway.  I wonder if we can just roll dice to score the points instead of answering qu...

Well, we made it home and I pulled my old mah-jongg set off the shelf, and opening the heavy wooden box was like a little pirate treasure moment.  Now you can see why I thought the game was so complicated.  Because it is.  There was a basic rulebook full of typos, which barely cleared up any of my questions.  The previous owner had purchased two different years of official league combinations, 4 copies of each at $4.25 per copy.  So that's a thing. The pieces were in big baggies, and I started by dumping out one bag only to realize they were in thodse baggies to make it easy to move them around to reach the parts beneath.  There was a little bag of joker tiles, and a bag of chips.  My set came with racks for the tiles, like Scrabble racks but with little pegs to hold your chip stacks for scoring. The rules gave no indication of a two-player variant, it was for four people only.  I'm sure we could work out a system, but it boggled my mind that only...

For some odd reason, I have never sat down with anyone to play mah-jongg.  I think it's because I knew the basic history of how complicated the game could be.  But some friends asked us to play a few hands so my gamer curiosity got us to the table to try it out.   The tiles were solid and hefty, and had a good feel to them.  At first we played around with a solitaire version, where you set up one of the standard shapes they show and try to clear the whole pattern one unblocked pair at a time.  That was okay, but works much better on an app, where designers set up hundreds of amazing patterns to try. After that, we had a four player session with a rummy feel.  It was fun setting up the fort.  I already knew the matches, and Anne caught on quickly (thanks to those apps).  Of course, we speculated about possible variations, and I suppose I bugged them with questions: can I add a tile to someone else's layout (no), can we pick up any tile or just...

Here's a card game we picked up on our last game/thrifting trip: Moose in the House.  I almost got this from the Gamewright website after finding another game of theirs that we really enjoyed about a year ago.  They have the rules PDFs for all their games, so you can get a feel for them.  That's a good idea.  I almost bought a few. The art is cute, worth some chuckles the first time you see them.  The rules have some funny gags in them, ending with facts about moose.  It plays out in a very simple way.  Each player gets 4 cards to start, and each player has a "house" in front of them, a space where cards are played.  You build houses by playing empty room cards in from of the other players.  You don't build your own house at all.  Each house can have a maximum of 3 empty room cards. To kick off the fun, when you get a Moose in the House card (the one with the moose walking through the front door), you play it on an opponent, after which ...

I bought this game for Anne because of the cute & famous dog.  It's clearly another Game of the Goose (see my blog post on those) variant where you race to the center of a round board with 64 spaces, with some spaces to send you forward or back.  In the older Goose games, the effects of the special spaces would all be listed on the game board in little tiny text.  It is so much better to draw cards when landing on these, like the Benji game does.  The obvious benefit is that you get different results each time you play. We found a gap in the rules within the first few minutes.  The rules say that when you land on the angry dog you go back to the start, and when you land on "any other picture" space, draw a card.  It feels like they meant "any other photo", because there are other pictures -- bone, heart and food -- which just feel different, and the way they clump up near the end of the track makes drawing cards too chaotic.  Those other picture sp...