ScottVee Gaming

Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...

Continuing with the book of ancient board games, we ran through a game of Senet.  It feels like a precursor to backgammon.  Can't escape that.  I realize that these are artist rendering of actual relics, but I would have put some tiny arrows at the top right side and middle left to show how the spaces flow around the edges. The base rules say to start with the pieces on the board in an alternating pattern, but that does give a tiny advantage to one player.  The main variation says to roll to get your pieces onto the board -- maybe we will try that next time.  Instead of capturing a piece or sending it back to start by landing on it, you swap that piece with your piece.  So if you landed on a piece with a four, you move your piece ahed 4 and send that piece back 4.  We called that "being bumped".  To me, the most interesting piece of strategy was that putting two of your pieces in a row makes them immune from being bumped, and three in a row is a b...

I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...

I got a bit tired of the word unscramble games I had been poking at in between other things lately.  A while back I switched to Zen Word, which is very similar to the others (Word Collect and Word Trip), but it just has a more relaxing vibe.  Some app was also installing games when I never asked for them.   Zen Word boots up with a little uplifting quote, and has short 3-line poems for each new "location".  The poems are not very good ... they have a good choice of words but only a few had a decent rhythm.  It's so easy to just start writing words and forget to read them aloud to see how they sound.  If you can stick to the same number of syllables or accents per line, the result can just flow off the tongue rather than getting stuck in a bunch of extra sounds.  Others felt like they had translation issues.  But it was a nice feature, again going with the relaxing vibe. The dictionary in Zen Word is better than the other two games. ...