ScottVee Gaming

The last new app of the week was Lords of Discord.  Again, this was turn-based, but this time the style was orthogonal and the combatants stand in specific spots and do their thing.  The initiative is show by sorting the icons at the top of the screen and as each guy's turn comes up, you can attack, defend, or wait.  Some guys have special abilities.  The usual stuff. There was a castle screen, of course, but after the first visit, it was almost always covered up by a big frame trying to get me to go to the arena or whatever.  I was able to train two new troops, but I only had one slot open in my party.  There is a reasonable range of character types and art to choose from, but it just feels like something is missing.  I should be able to take more PCs out to explore, but I guess everything is perfectly balanced to the expected party strength.  I don't know. It would add a lot if you could move a PC to a different space during battle.  The first time I put a new guy into the ba

  Backpack Merge is a fun lightweight clicker that I installed last weekend.  You are a little Harry Potter dude and the object of the game is to merge items in your limited backpack space, expand that backpack space, merge more items, then auto-battle wave after wave of unnamed creatures at the top of the screen.  I got through the first few levels and found it amusing, though 20 waves of creatures is too much.   After a long run of successes, it suddenly got harder without warning and my backpack full of goodies no longer beat the baddies.  It turns out that you have to go to the equipment page and keep updating your items (click the item and then the tiny Info button, then Upgrade if you have the tokens to do so), so the power creep seems well balanced.  There are additional items and more slots that open as you level up.  You can swap items in and out of those slots to try them all. Somewhere, I have to unlock tier 5 items.  There are a lot of screens of shops and other stuff, and

I had not been on Empire & Puzzles for about 6-8 months, and popped on this weekend hoping to see a new Season 6 map.  I finished the big Season 5 Egypt map about a year ago, and after that they just added "Untold Tales" which is a disappointing and repetitive stack of over 100 fights with fish and sea creatures. This time, there were some extra splash screens pointing me to the new section of the game.  Dragonspire is essentially a whole new city/castle to build, a Stronghold and new kinds of buildings producing and storing new kinds of items.  This time it's dragon training, storage for eggs, fish and dragonstone, and the promise of more buildings unlocking as we level up the Stronghold.  There's a whole new Heroes screen where every character is either a dragon or a puffed-up dragonlike version of a normal animal.  I completed level 3 only to find that level 4 is Coming Soon.  There are new items, ascension items, training tomes and more to find, with bundles o

I tried a few new app games this week.  It's really hard to find the exact mix I'm looking for.  I am open to new twists or game mechanics, but they are rare.  Most apps run the same specials, the same boosters for the same 5 or 6 stats, the same contests and guilds and clickbait stores. One that I found was Hero Park.  It starts off saying, "This is the story of an old man and his unicorn," which I thought was cute and spunky.  In this game, you are building a town full of shops that craft items for adventurers, and you stock the dungeons where they can get loot and then spend the loot of beer and turkey legs in your tavern. When the unicorn zooms off to find new adventurers, it's hilarious.  Well, it was hilarious the first time, and now I just click that top-right button and the unicorn is usually off the bottom of the screen at the time.  The unicorn brings in new adventurers.  Four cards are shown at first, so choose the two with the most money who need the m