ScottVee Gaming

We picked up Skor at Barnes & Noble this weekend.  It looked like a simple piece placement game with enough variables to get interesting, and that's exactly what it turned out to be.  It can be played with 2 to 4 players.  We had two players as usual. There is a game board and a box full of big chunky discs representing shields, each with an outer (wood) color and a center (metal) color.  Each player in a 2-player game starts with four of these shields, and they each turn you place one on the board (see below for other rules).  You capture pieces by making combos of 3 or more of a kind, matching the outer color OR inner color on all three pieces.  After each turn, you grab discs from the box to bring your total back up to four. If that's all there was to it, it would just be a tic-tac-toe game with captures.  The outer and inner colors make it essentially two simultaneous tic-tac-toe games.  But there are two more rules: (1) you can put a shie...

We picked up a few games at Barnes & Noble today.  I went in there specifically to get the latest Scrabble Dictionary, because I have another blog where I specifically talk about word and word games, and sequences of words, and I wanted an easy way to note which words were Scrabble words, without having to type every word into a darn web search. Will Shortz is a puzzle legend, and his website and amazing profile can be found here . I remember way back when he was the editor of Games magazine, but his credits are as much fun to read as any set of game rules.  I wish I had accomplished one tenth of what he did in the realm of gaming. I grabbed this game because it sounded very simple, and it was as simple as it sounded.  Basically, as a two player game, each player draws 15 letter tiles from the box, and someone rolls the four big chunky dice.  The dice combos give the rules, and it's a race to see who can build the first two-word crossword solution to the rules sh...

Here is one of the games we got a Geppettos.  It's not really a game, it's a set of puzzles for one player to work out, but like Cat Crimes (the very first game I discussed on this blog ) we enjoy doing puzzles together.  It is clearly marked as "Puzzle Game for One Player," so that was fair. The puzzle is simple: you have to use every piece in the game to complete a valid path to get the dog to the human.  In the beginner puzzles, there are only two pieces for you to fill in, and you can get the hang of it quickly.  Each piece can only turn the path a certain direction, and there is one bridge piece where you can run a piece or path beneath it.  The medium difficulty puzzles leave 3 or 5 pieces open for the player to figure out.  The advanced puzzles show nothing but where the dog and human pieces go, and you have to figure out the entire set of pieces -- those are seriously difficult, and I'm not sure we completed one of those. I also had to wonder if the...

On a trip to Mission Valley and Mission Beach, we randomly stopped at the Fashion Valley Mall for some food options, and came across a colorful toy/game shop called Geppetto's.  It had a big selection of games, toys, activity books and overall fun, playful things.  The games were mostly casual classics and party games, no really heavy boxes or Wingspan, just quick basic games and puzzles, from Bananagram to Monopoly. Comically, two days later we would be in Old Town San Diego, where there was another Geppetto's to visit.  It turns out this was the original shop, and the woman who worked there said they now had 9 locations. Here is their website. I'm sure I have run into them before, after all, the website says they've been "San Diego's Toy Tradition for Over 40 Years!"  Although, none of their locations are in places we visit regularly. The nearest store is in Carlsbad, so I am making a mental note to go check them out (again) soon.  Probably next payday ....

Anne showed me a new card game this weekend.  It was called "Tick", and was something she played with her usual canasta group when less than four players showed up.  The basic idea was: use two decks of cards, then play hands or 3 cards with 3s wild, 4 cards with 4s wild, up to 13 cards with Kings wild, then back down from K to 3 again.  Cards count as face value (2 to 13) with Aces being 21.  If you manage to go out, you score -25, otherwise, lay off what you can and score the rest as positive points.  Lowest score wins. To go out, you need to play straight flushes or X-of-a-kind, with the wildcards and jokers.  It's a long, drawn-out kind of rummy, but it's interesting how some card counts are harder to get rid of.  Getting rid of the hands of 5 and 8 are tough, since you need runs of 4 or 5, with one card left to discard.  With 13 cards, you usually have 2 or 3 wilds.  When one player goes out, the other players have one more turn to clear...