ScottVee Gaming

Minecraft was celebrating its 15th anniversary this month, and made it a lot of fun.  There was a bit of a scavenger hunt across Tiktok and Discord to get some capes, and one free piece of character bling per day.  Those is not really my thing, but I am now wearing an axolotl cap on my head and some weird nether leggings.  This was a big showcase event for Bedrock edition, as most of these items wont work in Java until some future update, if ever. The key item for me was their 15th Celebration map, which was a massive piece of eye candy at first, with hundreds of custom blocks and custom paintings I wish we could get for our own builds.  (Then I realized they are probably available in Bedrock add-ons or will be soon.)  But after exploring, it just went on and on, with a delightful central cake room surrounded by tables where every major creature and character in the game had a carefully scripted cake-eating routine.  Some of those were comedy classic. ...

Here's a game I got a few months ago but have not had a chance to look at until now.  Space Chase by National Geographic, from 1967, almost as old as I am.  The first thing that stood out is that I was missing some pieces.  There were 3 astronauts but 8 ships.  The game didn't come with a parts list, but some of the cards had only two where others had up to 8.  Looking at BoardGameGeek, it came with 4 astronauts and 8 ships, but also had a printed rulebook.  That would have been nice to have ... Link to BGG The first annoyance is that, while the parts were cute, they were vertical and were always falling over.  We would prefer small plastic disks -- we might just used colored dice for the pieces next time.  The second annoyance was having the rules printed all over the game board, on different sides facing different directions, but that's not unusual for games of this era, so okay.  But then the overview printed inside the box said different ...

We just got our package today with the New Tricks expansion to Dog Park.  Of the four lots offered on eBay, I picked this one because it included a Kickstarter special pack with stickers, postcards, a little pack of 7 wild dogs that all sound like pups the designers have known personally, and limited-edition wooden tokens for resources and dog walkers, and an 8-space board for one player to use as their kennel. The New Tricks pack adds a whole new deck of dogs, including mixed breeds who count for both breeds. There is a fold-out row of 8 spaces to put the new Trick cards, so that each breed can access a trick and they are shuffled to start each game.  There are new forecast cards, new Location cards and expanded location modifiers including cardboard pieces that completely cover the dog park space with its new effects. We will be testing it out over the weekend, but for now, here is Anne's dog Dory next to the matching Dog Park card.  As a mix of cairn terrier and chihua...

We stopped at Barnes & Noble to see if they had any of the expansions for Dog Park, but they did not.  There did have a new game called Penny Black ... really, a game with a stamp collecting theme in a major retail store.  I grabbed it, not even wondering at the price.  From the box size and weight I figured it would be $35-$40, but it was only $30. We tried it out on the patio after dinner, and it was different from anything else we have played in the last 100+ blog posts.  There was a mild annoyance at first, since there was a barcode on the box cover that said to click here to watch a video about how to play, but the page had no video.  It wasn't hard to find someone else doing the work for them , but really, if your barcode says X, you need to make sure that it goes to a page with X on it. The parts are all nice and solid, with a big bag of plastic stamp tiles and four cute albums to put those stamps into.  The stamps fall into four colors/denominat...

As we try out so many games per year, we keep our favorites and try to find homes for the others.  There is only so much shelf space.  It used to be fun to resell them, but with shipping costs higher than most of the games are worth, we started looking for other outlets.  We want them to get played.  We tried listing whole boxes of them on NextDoor for bargain prices, but only ever got gripes about not being settling for crummy offers.  We don't want to take everything to Goodwill.  We don't really like them anymore.  There are lots of other thrift shops and charities in town, but it feels like they will just disappear into the system, maybe end up on a shelf, maybe someone will buy them trying to make a buck.  Are they going to get to the gamers, or possible future gamers that way? We tried letting family members know about them, but either they were non-gamers and didn't care ... or they were gamers who only want a few very specific things, as g...

While finding and trying new games, we have a soft spot for games with a theme of cats or dogs, so when I saw a preview of Dog Park, I quickly hopped onto eBay to get a copy. At first glance it looked too complicated, with too many little pieces to fuss over.  But I felt it would be worth having an actual copy of this one to see how it feels. Yes, it has a lot of pieces, and multiple sets of cards, and a big board that gets cluttered, but since the turns are clearly split into phases, and each phase uses only a few pieces or cards, and one section of the board, it ends up feeling like three different games that you play in an alternating pattern.  There are also handy cards that outline what to do in each phase, so all players can follow along or look ahead to see what's coming next. Like usual, for the first run through we went with just the basics, so we ignored the Forecast cards, Objectives and the dog abilities.  Each turn has four phases: Recruitment (bid on new dog...

I have been having a lot of fun playing what I think of as "colorful puzzle games".  These are apps with a highly graphical theme, where each level has some series of visual puzzles to solve.  You usually have to find some wire or battery or key or wrench and figure out where it goes to unlock more complex puzzles.  Or the other way around: you see a cabinet with a hexagonal hole and have to go find whatever crank or screwdriver will fit.  The basic "find the object" parts are usually preety easy, but they tend to have a relaxing vibe and the developers go out of their way to throw in some visual effects that you never see coming.  A simple suitcase might cause the entire platform around it to twist and rise up and open into some weird computer console.  What looks like a violin might unpack into a missile silo.  I have to give these developers credit for imagination and attention to detail, and though every one of these apps has Google Play reviews sa...