ScottVee Gaming

This was another card game that had been sitting around for a few weeks.  The setup is simple: each player is dealt 9 cards, then each player makes a 3x3 grid of face-down cards and flips any two of them face up after that.  Between the players is the draw pile and discard pile.  The point is to get the lowest score at the end.  That's it.  The cards range from 0 to 10, with a few multicolored -5 cards thrown in. The card dynamics of this game are really interesting.  You can draw a card from the draw pile or the top discard.  Then either replace one of your cards (face up or face down) with the new card (face up), or if you pulled from the draw pile you can choose to discard the card and peek at one of your face down cards instead.  So there is a bit of a memory game going on. There are black "action cards" which let you peek at any card from any player, or swap any two of your cards, or swap any card of yours with an opponent card of your choice...

We wanted to spend some time outside under our gazebo, so I grabbed some small games we had not tried before.  The first was Skip Bo Junior.  It looked like a goofy kids game, and those can be a lot of fun.  We have never played Skip Bo (Senior), so we knew nothing about this version. The Junior version is just a matter of making sequential stacks of 1 to 10 and trying to get rid of your cards.  The art is a bunch of funny and cheerful bugs numbered 1 to 10 with a ? (wild card).  You start with a stack of 10 cards face down -- this is your stockpile.  Flip the top card face up.  At first you have to picture three face-up cards next to your stockpile and four playable spots in the middle of the table where you build stacks. The game play was smooth and easy to learn, and a lot of actual fun.  More fun then I expected from looking at the box and thinking, "Oh, another game where you stack cards from one to whatever." Each round, you are dealt three ...

We brought Cat Lady back over from my place and it was more fun that we had remembered.  Sure, there are a bunch of different scoring options to keep in mind: feeding the cats, the catnip, the costumes, who has the most different types of toys and such. The overall flow of taking a row or column of 3 cards, and then having the cat token say which row or column is not available all went very smoothly.  The Spray Bottle card lets you move thte cat token to another row or column when you really want those cards that are blocked. I put together a handy little score sheet to help wrap up those final numbers. You can download the PDF here. Since all the food and lost cat cards end up on the discard pile as you trade them for food tokens and Stray Cats, you have to shuffle well or you will get a grid of just food.  Sometimes there are too many cats and not enough food, other times no cats show up for the first five or six turns. I suppose you could really study the available car...

Here is a game we got a few weeks back at the thrift shop in Ramona.  Blokus gives you a big grid and each player gets a bag of tetris-shaped pieces.  You take turns putting pieces on the board, starting in the corner squares and only connecting to your existing pieces at the corners.  At first it felt like a simple game where you get as much territory as you can and block the other player in.  But a solid line of your pieces won't stop to other player if there's a corner they can expand on.  So it gets really interesting. With two players, I can't see any way we would not both get all our pieces down.  But there are a few rule variants on the little instruction sheet.  One said for one player to play blue and red and the other to play green and yellow, and we played them in alphabetical order.  That gave a much better feel for the game, and one by one the players got stuck.  When the last player is unable to move, everyone gets minus one poi...

Playing with WarZone a bit this week, I discovered that there is an "Idle" campaign at the bottom of the main page.  Either that's new, or I just didn't see a year ago when I first wrote about this great app. The Idle campaign is set up in a very interesting way.  The maps appear to be the same sequence as in the main game: you start with the standard Risk world map.  But now, you have a certain amount of money and armies shown at the top right as W and A values.  You gain some amount of each per second, and each space has an army value shown on it.  So maybe Brazil starts at 96.  Click it when you have 96 armies and it's your without a fight. Some spaces have "resources", which include Army Bases (where you can buy armies for W's), Caches (some amount of Ws and As), Mines, Forges and Crafters.  Some of these can be upgraded by spending Ws to get more per second.  You can forge ores into ingots like so many other games and sell all the resources f...

I accidentally started a new map on WarZone before bed last night.  This one is a simple grid where every 3x3 block is a territory worth 5 armies each.  So, you spend a lot of time on those making sure to complete your territories while busting the ones your opponents control.  I guess that's true of all Risk-based games. Anyway, it was a lot of fun watching all those little numbers extending arrows and fighting over spaces.  Last week I failed at a few other community maps, but this one was generic and balanced.  I filled in my corner ... only to find that the board wrapped around when I was attacked by a long, stretchy arrow from the top edge.  So I slowly extended my control to one block beyond my core territory so I had at least one move's notice when attacks were coming my way. So here I am, the deep blue state (ironically, being in California in this particular election year), and it turns out the pink state was my ally.  Pink was almost wiped ou...

We found this one at a thrift shop in Ramona for $4.99, and I remember telling Anne, "I heard this one was cool."  She gave me one of those "you always say that" looks, but I really did want to see what was in this particular box.  It took a while to get to it with all the projects we have going on. Quick note: it's not technically a "game".  The box clearly says it's a puzzle for one player.  But if it was just me trying to figure it out, I would probably have given up after the first half hour.  This will always be a better experience with another person helping to find the clues. When you first open the box, it is underwhelming.  It looks like a deck of about 200 cards, a pen and a notepad.  You follow the instructions on the cards in order, and one of the first odd things you are asked to do is to put a special card in the freezer.  Sure, why not?  I figure some kind of message will appear.  Anyway, you sort through some basic trivia...

Another game from the classic era (1990s) that I played a lot back then.  "Master of Magic" by Microprose.  There is a version available from gog.com for $2.99 which comes nicely packaged with a launcher app called "Gog Galaxy" that knows how to setup DOSBox behind the scenes so the game just came up full screen, ready to play. Of course, considering the anticipation, I got one of the worst starts I have ever seen.  I was stuck on a tiny island no more than 5x5 hexes.  Nowhere to build a new settlement, and the few pieces I did build ran out of money quickly due to bad location of my only town.  But it was nice to see those old familiar screens again. This was a clone of the original Civilization (which I also played for hours on end), except that your generals are wizards who have spells that can affect the battles.  There are also power nodes of various elements, and a whole other dimension you can expand into.  Instead of the usual troop types and ...

Continuing my previous post of retro "2-1/2 D" games from the 90s, I was able to get Moraff World running in DOSBox at a usable size by hitting Alt-Enter for full-screen mode. After playing for another hour or so and finally dying, here are some tips and observations: The main hazards are the unmarked pits ("chutes") that drop you down to lower levels where you are less likely to survive.  As soon as I fall into a pit, I look for the nearest ladder back up, but sometimes fall down another pit before I can get there.  Once you have found a pit, it stays on the map as a "*" symbol.  I ended up down on level 10 as a level 2 PC, and it did not go well. One time I fell down a chute to a room with no ladders or doors.  You can bump into walls to look for secret passages, and sometimes walk right through the wall.  But when there are no exits at all, you have to hit D to dig a hole in the floor.  This is pretty funny, with some text messages to entertain you....

About the Merge X3 game I mentioned a few posts ago.  One thing that bugs me with the 2048 games is that they can go on forever.  In this case, if you do get stuck (no open spaces left) it only costs 30 gems to clear the middle of the board and keep going.  I have 4500 coins, so that is essentially endless.  I only used that hack one time. Drag drag drag.  It's not the best use of a human mind ;-) but sometimes we're just in that mood for doing nothing. When I saw that the overall player rankings are based on the highest tile discovered, I only had about 8 tiles to go to move up to the top.   ... and there I am.  #1 player in the world. I do enjoy playing less-popular games, since you have a greater chance of actually ranking in the top zillion players.  For me, for now, getting to #1 counts as beating the game.  Been there, topped off.  On to the next challenge. I won't uninstall it right away.  I will keep an eye for future update...

We played the Pirate's Cove mini golf course, and with only a few people playing, we could take our time.  We forgot to get a scorecard but whatever ... we don't play for points anyway.  Just hit the ball and have fun, though with the freeway 100 feet away the whole area smelled like gas.  We were behind a couple who never heard of the rule to pick up your ball after five shots and move on.  So I had time to check out the design of the place.  The first big structure looked like the final scene of Butch Cassidy but with stairs up and over and down to the next hole, then stairs back up the fake mountain with the water pouring down the side.   We were overtaken by a couple with two hyperactive little girls who walked all over the hole we were at, so we just let them go first and move on to bug other people.  Around hole 7 there was an orange cat in the bushes, looking content with itself.  Around hole 9 we both felt suddenly faint.  That was fu...

Saturday off.  We dropped Dory at doggie day care and went out to Boomers in Vista to play around and try some miniature golf. The air hockey table took our $1 swipe, but there was no puck.  By the time I got a new puck from the lady at the prize table, the air hockey table was only barely blowing air, so it was a half game that went on way too long, and Anne ended up hurting her back.  Off to a good start. We played a round of miniature golf and will cover that separately. The arcade games were mostly disappointing.  About one out of four card swipes did nothing: took the money and did not activate.  I'm not sure we ever got a full minute of play time on any of the big machines on the main floor.   There was a two-seat fishing game with cute graphics.  You hit a button to drop your hook down, and it hooks the first fish in the way and then you crank a handle to reel it up.  Really well implemented: it was a challenge to get past those top...

This game-in-a-game just appeared in Backpack Merge.  You have to clear Stage 3 to get the button.  It's a simple roll-and-move game, and your goal is to get stars and bonuses.  The stars count on the bonus bar at the top, so it takes 40 stars to get that first bonus.  Come here when you see the red dot on the game icon on the main page, and click the green Go button to claim dice for completing quests.  You can get a purple "magic die" by watching an ad. Then, on the main board, click to roll dice and move.  Some of the odd bits: - the crystal ball at top left highlights one of the stars on the board -- I could not see a reason - the train zooms you over to the right to the 300 magic dust - the jail at top right gives you three chances to roll doubles (feels like Monopoly) but you always get out anyway - the checkerboard on the right edge appears to swap the entire board from a right-half to a left-half. - the lucky die lets you pick a number from 1 to 6 t...

This popped up on one of my feeds over the weekend, and wow, I had to grab it.  It says 26 books for a recommended $25 or pay-what-you-like, but most of the "books" are multiple volumes of content. The Humble Bundle Call of Cthulhu Pack should keep me reading for months.  I don't have any players I could run through these eldritch horrors, but I have always enjoyed reading sourcebooks and scenarios as if they were their own genre of fiction, which in many ways is true. This deal ends in 5 days, so I'm not sure if any readers will see it in time, but it's worth noting on my stream of events in my gaming life.  I still have some of the CoC first edition books, and ran some pretty scary nights of fun back in the day.  Which reminds me of this true story ... "Stake Thy Neighbor" I don't know if you remember that old Salem's Lot miniseries from about 1980 where dead Danny Glick floats up to that kid's second story window and starts tapping with h...

We headed up to Ramona today to see some live music at a winery at 2PM.  We were early enough (thanks to the extra hour from setting our clocks back) that we had a chance to look into a few antique shops and thrift shops. At the Ramona Food and Clothes Closet, there was a surprisingly long shelf of board games, about 8 feet long down at ankle level.  We almost didn't do inside at all, since it "food and clothes" didn't sound like the right place for what we were looking for.  And we saw no food items. But they did have games.  It was mostly kid stuff and trivial pursuit packs, even a big box game of trivia about wine, and a few Bible learning games (no thanks).  But we did find some keepers: Box One was the big game put out by Neil Patrick Harris a few years ago.   Blokus looks like a tetris game where you try to block each other on an actual board. Utter Nonsense might be fun, and there were some card game for $2: Low Down, Skipbo Junior and Bold. We ...

This is another dungeon runner.  You make some PCs and start in the City where you have the usual choices.  Go into the Dungeon any time, where you are a small blue box moving through hallways and getting into fights.  I don't mind minimal graphics.  Sometimes, that's a charm. The class system in this one is interesting: everyone starts as a Nomad with all stats set to 1, and each time you level up you get a "+" button to update one stat.  You change to a real class by leveling up to the required stats and going to the Guilds area to switch.   The City My team made it to level 5, and now exploring level 1 is too easy, most of the foes can be taken out with two clicks.  You just have to keep an eye on your hp bars running low.  Bring lots of the red life potions to heal.  I've been to parts of level 2 and 3 and it's more of the same layout with some different foes.  Still no rhyme or reason. I got one of my PCs up to Dexterity 7 so he cou...