ScottVee Gaming

We covered the Tlaquepaque area yesterday.  Today we spent a lot of time driving and walking the main roads and back corners of Sedona.  Of course we came here for the great outdoors, but every time we tried to get near a trail it was a clog of No Parking signs, No Hiking signs, so I guess you can only get to those landmarks by shuttle these days. There were some games to be found in town, just not together in any one place. The local Goodwill had only one board game that was out of the ordinary, and it was Buffalo in a Box, a Monopoly clone for Buffalo NY that somehow ended up in Sedona -- I didn't see the name of the company that made this, but it was not one of the usual Opoly knock-offs.  Did not buy. The library book store had lots of jigsaw puzzles but no games. We did find one very unusual game at the Twice Nice Thriftique, for the Verde Valley Sanctuary, a charity for battered women in the area.  We also saw a donation table for them at a local supermarket....

We were on vacation in the Sedona area, so we went over to the Tlaquepaque Shopping complex where Google marked a toy shop for us.  Right away, we were slapped in the face with how insanely expensive most things were in these shops.  $8000 metal sculptures, $1000 paintings, $30 salads and appetizers.  No point even walking into the jewelry shops.  We're both at the point in life where we don't want "things" anymore.  So, the buildings were gorgeous, and the whole structure was a mind-blowing fun maze of little passages and narrow stairways.  But we stopped going into the shops because they made us feel poor and unwanted. We did stop at the Tlaquepaque Toy Shop on the second floor and it was like a small piece of our world, an oasis in the sea of unattainable things.  They had about 20 small board games, mostly games we already owned, like Set and What's the Point, but it was more about toys and science kits than board games.  They had an entertain...

There was a street fair in town on Sunday,  and though we almost never see a product we want or need anymore, one table had a little game console with 700 retro arcade games installed.   I couldn't say no to having a treasury of games like that at my fingertips. It was easy to set up.  It turns out that about half of these were Japanese editions that I would not be able to read,  though there would be some surreal element to not knowing what is being said. Still,  that left a few hundred,  including classics like Defender, Galaga, Ghostbusters, Arkanoid, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Panzer Attack, and others.  Scrolling through a list of hundreds of items is tedious. It is really odd looking back now, how these games had so little memory or file space.  It's amazing they could deliver so much content with so few resources.  These days,  for a simple game, we'd probably pack a dozen mp3 tracks for music, but each of those files is 1...

We finally got to sit down and play Flow.  The animated film was amazing, and I couldn't think of any way to capture the feel of it in a board game, but we wanted to give it a shot.  We really don't like timers, and this came with a little hourglass.  But from the box, it reminded me a bit of the Saving Nemo game that we like so much -- a simple tile placement path-building game. Yes, that's what it is.  But it's a cooperative game where players work together to join all their animal starting points to the island in the middle. Each turn you either flip a tile and put it in the map,  or play a card to change something.   When the timer runs out,  roll the black and white Wave dice.  Remove all tiles on the row and column indicated by the dice,  then flip the hourglass and keep going. Our first run was just two animals, and it was a quick, easy win.   Connecting all four corners was more of a challenge.   ...

Time to try yet another Fluxx game.  It's hard to believe it took them 20 years to think up "cats" as a theme.  Sure, most of their past editions were sci-fi and fantasy.  Can't go wrong with cats, though. It played as expected, with some pretty funny goals and actions.  I like the "cat distribution system" action, where a player with more than 2 cats in front of them has to give cats to players with no cats.  Because everyone needs cats. Some of our usual gripes about Fluxx came to light.  When there too many rules, it all slows to a halt.  We really don't like reading a ton of text on a ton of cards to figure out what moves to make.  When there are less than 3 rules in play, it all flows nicely.  Maybe 3 will still work.  But when there are rules to exchange cards, swap keepers, get extra cards, replace goals and discard things, all at once, it just doesn't feel like the player's turn is well defined anymore. One of the tricky rule shi...