ScottVee Gaming

We had some time today in between making new copies of house keys and taking Mango the Cat to the vet, and halfway between A and B was On Board Gaming .  So we stopped by to see what was new. There was a big Magic: the Gathering game going on, filling two long tables.  And a few other people were milling around.   We were amused by how many cat-themed games had appeared on the shelves compared to our last visit.  We saw Boop the Halls -- see my blog post about that series .  There was a new Cat Fluxx game -- how did it take them 20 years to think up a cat-fancy version of that one?  About eight other other cat games caught our eyes (House of Cats, etc), but most looked to be more complex or full of tiny parts than what we enjoy playing.  Not counting the Exploding Kittens or Kittens in a Blender -- what is WRONG with those people?  That's not funny. We saw a board game tie-in to the recent animated film Flow, which, if you're an animal lover ...

Here is an item I was happy to finally get my hands on.  There were a lot of household products in the 70s and 80s that had some elaborate activity packs or games for kids.  This is a pack "Compliments of Chef Boyardee" with a scene of dinosaurs on the outside.  I'm not sure if you had to send in coupons or labels to get this, but it was a surprisingly elaborate set of die-cut designs. Unpacking this was a lot of fun.  And don't worry, I got a second one that I can keep untouched.  But games and toys are meant to be played with.  So we had fun punching out the dinosaur scene.  It had two vertical folds, so it was meant to stand up and be the backdrop for whatever scenes we felt like staging with the cardboard dinosaurs.   There were two cardboard dice that you punch out and fold, and with very clever use of tabs and slots, they held together well. I wouldn't expect any world-class deep strategy game in a kid's activity pack, but the game was ...

Here was a strange sequence of bored gaming ... Last night we were testing out some new apps on my new big screen tablet, and found a collection of two-player games that had a version of Ludo among other things.  Oddly, it ended when the a player got their first piece to the middle.  That was odd, we were each moving a bunch of pieces and had no idea that was going to happen.  I figure they were trying to keep things short. Today, we dusted off that old "100 Classic Games" box because I knew there was a ludo board in there.  We played a game where again the first piece to reach the middle was the win, and it stripped the whole flow of the game.  We each just got onr or two pieces out and raced for it. So we tried it again the classic way, where you have to get all four pieces to the middle, and that's how I remembered the game was supposed to feel.  Camp a piece or two right behind the other player's escape space.  Keep pieces tailing the other player...

Yes, there is a game celebrating the old Honeymooners TV show with Ralph & Alice, Norton & Trixie.  Reading the back cover description on an eBay listing, it sounded kooky and different, so I went for it.  A few days later, there it was. One little note: the pieces and cards were still sealed in plastic bags, and the game pieces (all different colors of Ralph) were oddly greasy or slimy, even after a quick rinse.  Whatever plastic they used did not age well, so we used dice as our pawns, like so many other times. It's a roll and move game where you have to visit all 4 corners of the board to get a bonus card from each of those piles.  Nothing fancy there.  What sounded like fun was how the main flow of the game was driven by character lines and punch lines. If you land on a space that says "Ralph's line" or any other character's line, play one of those cards if you have it.  Read it out loud, of course.  For each of those, there a matching punc...

We were moving games from one stash to another this weekend, and Mummy Math came back to the surface.  We got this on a trip up north in 2023 . This is from Learning Resources .  This is from Learning Resources. It has no copyright date, but my guess would put it around 1995.  Their web site is still around and they have come a long way since these old plain cardboard box days, but this particular game is not listed. It wasn't going take much time to test it out.  It's like a set of flash cards for addition and subtraction, with one or two actual game elements.  Cute, though. Each player gets a board with a pyramid with a red triangle at top, and they choose a red triangle tile from the box to go in that top space.  The rules said orange, but the actual tiles were 90% red. After that, the goal is to fill each row of the pyramid with an equation that adds up to your top number.  Each players starts with 7 number tiles and can use any yellow "plus o...

We tested out the Mah Jongg Card Game we got at the toy shop in Julian last weekend. Like always, I will read through the rule book once or twice before actually trying to explain rules to Anne.  This one has several layers of complexity, but the basic game is just an extended version of Rummy.  There are all the suits and objects you would expect to find on Mah Jongg tiles, but with English captions for some of them, like the flowers and seasons. Basically, for the two player game, you deal 13 cards to each player and the dealer turns up a card on the discard pile.  That's not exactly what the rules say, but it has the equivalent result.  Technically, we're supposed to pass a card to the player on our left before the first draw.  Details, details. From there, the goal is to go out by getting three four-of-a-kinds and a pair then announcing "Mah Jongg!" and laying them down.  There are only a few other rules in the base game.  If you can use the top di...

Minecraft Explorers was a fun find at Walmart.  We almost never go there, but our George Foreman Grill broke and after some mean not-so-lean ground turkey spit grease all over Anne, we had to go find a new one.  While we were there, we found the game.   I trust titles by Ravensberger though they do tend to have a step more complexity than we prefer.  When I looked it over at home, I wasn't expected the huge two-sided rule sheet.  That sheet was printed separately in 6 languages so we chuckled the ones that were not EN.  The cards had so many icons and numbers I worried that Anne would just be annoyed by it . I ended up watching a solo walk-through which helped make sense of that double-sided page of rules.  I was able to explain it and we got through the games. I'm not sure how useful a brief explanation will be.   Watch the video.  Overall, the layout has a row of chest cards,  a row for monster cards, two rows for biome card...

On the way back from our Ramona/Julian weekend, we checked our local Barnes & Noble for the 30% off sale people had been talking about on Facebook.  Nope.  Full price.  We could not resist Boop, because it sounded so simple.  And it had cats.  And booping. It turns out that it really is that simple, on the surface.  The game board is just a piece of fabric with puffy squares, but you can flip over the box bottom so the whole thing looks like a bed.  So, it's just cats fighting over space on a bed. Each player has 8 kittens and 8 cats.  You start by placing one kitten on any space, which boops all neighboring pieces one block away from the piece you placed.  Except if there's another piece blocking the boop.  And kittens cannot push adult cats.   When you get three cats or kittens in a line, remove those kittens and promote them to cats by setting aside the kittens and moving an equal number of cats into your pile of playabl...

I don't really care for all the Monopoly clones and skins out there, all the rebranding and crazy stuff going on.  Let's let KamSandwich sort those out.  Love that guy. We were having a nice day of looking for games and relaxing in Julian, and saw Forest Animal-Opoly.  I'm sure we didn't NEED it.  We were just curious about what it would be like, and we have a soft spot for animal-themed games. Well, it's just Monopoly with the properties replaced with animals.  A bit surreal, renting squirrel and moose.  They turned the houses and hotels into some generic resource blocks.  That's about it.   Still, it was a fun little romp around the board on a relaxing weekend out in the middle of nowhere.  And we bought it from the California Wolf Center, hopefully supporting their efforts in some small way.

I ran a strategy game in my head to guess if there is any good time to drive up to Julian (CA) where it would not completely swarming with people.  Before Labor Day weekend, I had a Thursday appointment at the DMV so I took Thursday & Friday off.  In my head, I figured a friday morning would be the right time for that Julian trip. It worked out perfectly.  Half the shops didn't open until 11am, so 10 o'clock on a friday was optimal: there were barely a dozen people walking around town. There were tons of games tucked into different shops.  Julian Mercantile had a big game section upstairs and then a huge back room with some really fun themed booths with even more games.   After lunch we went to the actual game shop next door: Julian's Toy Shop.  This had a big selection of classic board games, card games, puzzles and toys.  We already owned almost every one of these games, at least some version of them.  The only thing I could find that I...