ScottVee Gaming

I did try to make a set of Rescue Mission rules for Grand Canyon Adventures.  It seemed like it would be simple: start at a space on the right side of the board, put four token (missing hikers) far away on the left side of the board, and go rescue them and bring them home.  Start with three Gear Cards, all Locations are sticky, and landing on any location gives you one Gear Card.  Helipads are non-functional, as they would make it too easy to hop across the map. I figured we should ignore Spins so it's not constantly blocked by random moves.  Unfortunately, I picked the location closest to the head of the river, so I could cruise the river across the map.  So I figure you both have to start at the same location to make it fair.  I think the Helipad at middle right is probably the best place to start.  That way, you bring the rescued person back to the helipad and imagine a trip to a hospital as your winning move. It was actually too easy without the Sp...

This was a big, heavy box with all three decks still in their original wrapping.  Even the two dice were in a little plastic slip.  It is from 2007 and appears to an official product for the Grand Canyon park, originally at GrandCanyonGame.com but the site is long gone. It has a BIG heavy game board with a gorgeous detailed map of the Grand Canyon on the non-playing side.  Wow.  Absolutely no reason for it, other than to add historical detail and production value.  It was a wonderful map, but then you flip over the board and start setting up. There are Canyon Cards with obstacles to overcome, and Gear Cards that help you overcome them.  There are 10 locations to visit, each with a stack of cards.  The goal is to pick any starting location and get around the board to get a card from all 10 locations.  What makes it more interesting that a simple roll-and-move game is that you roll two dice on the river and one die on land.  And the river is on...

Our home town is Esondido, CA ... and we have a lot of thrift stores.  Last weekend we were surprised to find that the Goodwill next to the post office has no game section at all.   Today we stopped at Deborah's Consignment Shop while Toyota was working on my car.  I didn't expect anything since it's almost all clothes and furniture, but there was a shelf way in the back that had a few games.  It was an odd selection of games, with Monopoly Empire (never heard of it but I have not liked any of the official Monopoly offshoots), a Christian Study Game, classic Scrabble and one other obscure title.   I ended up getting the Grand Canyon Adventure and Farm-Opoly.  The Grand Canyon game was a heavy box, and just sounded good.  Farm-Opoly was NOT made by the companies that have been pumping out Monopoly games skinned for every TV and movies franchise in the last decade, so I figured it was worth seeing what odd things it threw in there.  $12 each was a b...

I do like simple games when they come up, but they really do need to involve some kind of decision at least once in a while.  This one is just a deck of cards with nuts and squirrels.  On your turn you can keep drawing cards, as long as they are nuts.  You can stop and keep the ones you've got, or keep going.  But if a squirrel comes up, you lose all the nuts you gathered that round. That's it.  Just a version of Greed that you could play with regular dice, but here you have a few cute graphics. It might be good for really young kids.  It's mildly funny at first, but soon leads to, "That's it?" So, this will go in our donation box for the Boys & Girls club.   Along similar lines, Go Shark Go was just a Go Fish deck with different graphics, and Eats-a-Lotl looked cute but all you do is flip cards up and if you see a match, the first one to yell out the silly catch word gets the match.  No number, no points, not our kind of game.  I re...

This one feels a bit like Cat Lady, but without the distraction of toys and costumes. There is a deck of Animals and a deck of Help cards (health, hearts, food), also a deck of Location cards oriented horizontally.  The animal deck is interesting because one side has the sad version of the animal oriented vertically, where the other side shows the happy animal horizontally. The setup is just the sad-side-up deck of animals with two showing to the right of the deck, then the face-down deck of Help cards with three face up cards next to it.  Then the Location deck with three face-up cards. The basic idea is that you can draw two cards each turn, any face-up card.  Some animals give you a bonus card, so if it has a plus sign you get a free card with a plus sign if there are any showing. The overall flow involves grabbing sad animals, then getting Help cards to care for them.  If you have the resources the animal needs, discard those and flip the animal to the happy side...

I can't remember the last time we bought a holiday-themed game.  But we were at B&N today, and Merry Grinchmas was on the shelf, and the back of the box showed a basic roll-and-move type board.  The Grinch is one of our favorite holiday characters of all times.  The Grinch wouldn't let us down or steal all our trees ... would he? It turns out, it is NOT a roll-and-move game at all.  It's more interesting than that.  Honestly, we looked for the little player tokens when we unboxed it and thought there might be pieces missing.  There was only a Grinch piece, a stack of Wish cards and a bag of Gift tokens. It's actually a very clever cooperative game where the cooperation doesn't feel forced or silly in any way.  You start by putting a gift on each of the A,B,C spaces and each of the houses (except the houses that the players choose as their homes).  And deal out the four Wish cards to the spaces.  Then, each turn goes like this: - spin and ...

Someone on Facebook blurbed that Barnes & Noble was having a nationwide 30% sale on all games.  So we stopped by to check it out, and yes, it was a thing.  So I found an armload for $100.  Two different clerks asked me if I wanted a bag for that pile, and each time I said, "No, stacking them so they don't fall is a game of its own." Here's a shot of what we found.   We like to grab a few from the grown-up section and then look at the kids section for clever little games.  We also saw Risk: Dune Edition, but with the thousands of custom games on Warzone, I didn't need it.  There were the expensive, complex games with Wingspan having all kinds of spin-offs and expansions now (Wyrmspan and such).  But if the setup takes more time than we've got to play the whole game, we have to skip it.  Others have gorgeous art but look like too much bookkeeping. I don't know what kind of discount program we signed up for at checkout.  There was a game wit...

Just because I haven't posted about new games in the past few weeks doesn't mean we have not played any.  We had a few rounds of Skip Bo Junior, some Low Down, a quick round of Niya (which was not as interesting as we originally found it in that hotel room over a year ago).  We played some Penny Black and others. We dusted off Wizard Kittens, and after watching their Kickstarter video to remind me how to play, it ran really quick and smoothly.  We were not into detailed scoring or rules on cards or extra points, just the scaled-down fun of trying to clear six curses before getting CAUGHT. We get plenty of enjoyment from our simplified house versions of games. Sometime we play at the tables under the gazebo in the backyard as it's not so hot out there this time of year, so as much as the big games can be a fine investment of $$ and brain power, sometimes we just want a deck of cards and a scrap of paper to write numbers on (or not even that).

A thread came up on one of the board gamer groups on Facebook where someone asked for a list of board games which have good implementations as game apps, and Cat Lady came up on that list.  We had to check that out. The graphics were perfect, with some cute f/x and music added, and it was easy to get up and running.  Just hit Play then Classic Game.  This defaults to a single computer opponent, but you can add up to three.  It also allows a second human player (and possibly more, we had no reason to check). Against the computer player, the game goes very quickly.  It's over before you know it, and since I tend to pick easy cats to feed (worth lower points) and forget to get toys, I lose about 75% of the time.  It all flows nicely: check your cards and see what you need, maybe feed a cat or two, then swipe some new cards into your hand.  The app organizes the cards very nicely and does all the calculations s you can see that your pick added 5 points, or...

I ran through a few more games of Warzone.  It's amazing how different the maps can feel -- this is most apparent in the Community maps.  There, I looked for non-standard levels, not based on real-world maps.  I found one where the regions were organized into two big asterisk shapes.  This one just kept going around and around, because there were 5 or 6 computer players and almost every space can be hit from 2 or 3 other spaces.  So , I completed three pentagons at most, reaching my max armies per round, but within a round or two, some other color would grab one of my spaces.  Check out the total chaos in the population map at the end. # Back on that map of Italy where the start-up message says, "You need to catch the enemy commaner before they reach their reinforcements in the north": it turns out that's exactly what you have to do.  Don't waste moves trying to capture all of Sardinia for extra armies.  Go directly to where you can attack acros...

This was such a wacky, random find.  I don't know what made me install it and run it, since I don't like slot machines or old-style pixellated graphics at all.  The basic idea is: you rented a new apartment and it's pretty much empty except for a mysterious slot machine.  You get a notice from your landlord that you need some amount of coins in just 5 spins.  So you start spinning the reels to try and get enough money.  When you do come up with the money, the landlord raises your rent, and sometimes a mysterious group ("the local aid network") emails you trying to help you out.  These messages include obscure notes about the game itself, and also red herrings like "you can pet the dog."  Which does nothing, as far as I could tell.  Another message said "these three things refer to previous games the developer has created," but I could not recognize any of those tiny icons. In between spins, you get a chance to add new symbols to the reels, and ...