ScottVee Gaming

I went to visit my brother Jon this weekend, and since he and his son were starting to play D&D together, there was a lot of D&D discussion, and for gifts I brought two new D&D books.  That was pleasant.  I'm glad the gifts fit in with their current levels and campaigns.  I went with the Humblewood campaign setting and the amazing Goodman Games big book of the Isle of Dread (history of the module, talks with the creators, conversion to 5e, and bonus items).  So: D&D is back. A bit later, he mentioned that he had something cool to show me.  Completely unexpected: he pulled my original D&D books from the early 80s out of his box of old gaming books.  Sure enough, those were them.  The bindings were wrecked from those years of use (almost weekly sessions from 1980 to 1985).  He showed where I had added two little stickers to the covers, and I had to agree, those were hilarious, and exactly the kind of thing Young Me would have don...

We tried Farm-Opoly on New Years Eve, while all kinds of explosions and noise and mayhem were going on outside.  It's really just Monopoly with different cards and renamed elements. The property cards all have funny stories or blurbs or info dumps on the backside, and some of the other cards are pretty funny, too. We went around until the first player was unable to pay a rent, then we declared the winner and got back to other things. We don't need to keep this one.  It's a perfect donation item, fun for younger players.

Triqueta looked like it would be fun and different, production was solid and the tiles were big and sturdy.  The setup was a pain (especially when one of our gaming group has shaky hands): getting all those pointy pieces into the perfect stacks.  Meh.  I guess they could have just been piles.  They looked nice in the clean stacks with the big tile for a lid.  My own hands were shaking by the time I got them all lined up and pushed together. It turn out that gameplay was odd.  When I read the rules, it sounded so simple: just pick a tile and either keep it face down or add it to a line of tiles, OR take a line of tiles and end your turn.  There are a total of four turns, and the face down tiles were limited to two PER GAME, not two per turn.  So we got it wrong first, then we tried a round with no face-down tiles, then we added the face-down tiles rule after we got a feel for the rest of the game. The scoring is easy: you try to make a triqueta (3-...