ScottVee Gaming

I like to find a style of game app and then look at similar games to see the range of possibilities.  Since Halloween is totally dead this year, I thought I should look through my phone and tablet for apps I have not mentioned on the blog yet. I gathered up some dice matching app games back in late 2023 to early 2024.  In these, you get one or two dice per round and can place them on the grid (rotating the two dice first if needed).  Typically, three 1s becomes a two and so on up to the three 7s which disappear and free up some room.  If you run out of space, game over. Those are all very simple, but they are good for short breaks at work.  Some I found are: Seven Dots, by Funvent Studios Dice Craft And this one simply called Merge.  In the App Store it's "Dice Merge" by Staple Games.  It last updated 30 Aug 2024.  I saw no difference from the previous version.  It's very basic, time to drop it. Most of these look like hobby projects, not sli...

Following up on the last post about old "roguelike" games, I looked at a few of the entries to the 7-Day Roguelike Dungeon Challenge, and here's one that went in a completely unexpected direction ... HyperRogue has your PC running around on a hyperbolic world.  You're essentially in the middle of what looks like a hex grid, but on a hyperbolic space, the paths double again and again as they near the edge, so as you walk in any direction, more hexes unfold in ways that hurt the brain.  I can't imagine trying to find my way back to a previous location.  It's not technically hexagons, either, the space expands by including heptagons in just the right places, and each of those brings in a new branch of tiles. There is an extensive Tour/Tutorial where you hint Enter to get to the next slide, and it turns out there's a massive world here divided into about 40 regions, each with unique tiles and mobs.  There is an explanation of hyperbolic geometry, and how the n...

I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue. I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove .   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes. He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient. He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do. To put credit where it belongs...

I was tinkering around in a game called Moonshades, which I would classify as a "semi-3D" dungeon crawler.  The scenes have 3-d elements, but they are fairly static.  You can walk (forward, backward, left or right, or turn left, turn right) to step one chunk at a time through a maze.  Fight monsters, take their stuff, level up your characters.  I find these relaxing, and really enjoy the highly creative names for the hundreds of items.  These modern games have some amusing cheats, like having teleport pads in every main encounter area so you don't have to walk all the way home through every level just to get to your drop chest.  I have also heard "two-and-a-half d" for these. While this is a fine game, with plenty to fight, and lots of abilities and spells to learn, and even some crafting, it got an old memory stuck in my head. So last night I was trying to remember one specific game from the 90s, a really early game of this type.  It was a DOS game wi...

We have seen this game a few times, and it looked cute.  We finally got a copy a few weeks back, finally got a chance to try it out today and, well ... it was confusing and weird, and not in the good way where we feel we're going to discover something we like.  We really wanted to like it, so we pushed through whatever the rulebook was trying to say. The rules really need a better section on how to identify the different types of cards, it just starts by saying to sort that big stack of cards you've never seen before into a deck for each dragon character card, a deck for each season, and a market deck. It turns out that the seasonal cards have colors behind the top half, and the market deck starts packed with the cards with a little "st" in the lower right (the "starter cards"), and the dragon cards all match the names at bottom center.  But a few cards have no markings, and we just threw them in the market deck.   Yes, there is a detailed Card Glossary page...

This is another game we got from Geppettos.  10 Days in the USA has a big game board map of the USA, a deck of cards and some plastic holders for organizing player hands and discard piles.  The goal is simple: to build a 10-card trip across the country. Most of the cards are states, including Alaska & Hawaii.  Other cards include cars that let you skip a state, and planes that let you jump to any state of the same color.  Note that the color of the plane must match the card before and after it, so you can't use a red card to hop between green states.  Side note: any color plane can get to Hawaii or Alaska. We do like rules-light games and that's about all the rules to be found here, except for one rule about how the travel in the four corners area.  You draw a card each turn, replace one of the cards in your rack, and discard one.  Once a card is in your rack you cannot move it. Actual gameplay was moderately frustrating for Anne, and like usual wi...

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 fi...

  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.   The buttons at the bottom are: Offers, Hero & Clothing, Adventure, Equipment, Challenges and (about two weeks ago) Guild. 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....

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, wit...

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 mon...