ScottVee Gaming

Klax is a very simple game where bricks come tumbling down a conveyor belt toward your catcher.  Catch them, move them, drop them to try and make matches.  The sound f/x of the tiles flap-flapping down the screen are hilarious at first, but a bit annoying as the game inevitably speeds up.  The overall feel is a kind of mutated Tetris, but it's not a blind race to fill rows like Tetris.  The levels have different goals: 3 diagonal matches, 3 horizontal matches, survive 50 blocks, etc. It can be played in a browser here . (no explanation of the keys to use) or here  , and there is a good history here . There is a screen for Options and one for "Stuff".  The Options were: Drop Meter On/Off, Difficulty, Ramping On/Off, Sound FX and Music On/Off.  The Stuff screen had options for Drum Test, Sound Test and a bizarre little hidden sub-game called Blob Ball.  But it's more properly a fragment of a game, just a one-paddle Pong where the ball has a lot of r...

On the game box I got recently, among the hundreds of old NES games, there were a few games that were so basic, I don't understand why they were released at all.  Let's start with Checkers.  You probably have a checkers set in your closet somewhere, so why would you spend money on a Nintendo cartridge for that? That being said, the game worked as expected and I was able to beat it on the first game.  I didn't see any options. Next up is Othello, which also might be in your closet.  It's also very common in game collections.  Again, the game worked as expected and I beat in on my first try. In both cases, the controls were a bit awkward.  To select the piece I want, I have to go left left left up up SELECT, then to move it: up right DROP.  And so on.  ON a real game board, you just pick things up and move them.  You know, like humans do. I am sure I programmed my own versions of these games as starter projects when I was learning code ages ago...

Anne is a big fan of sudoku puzzles.  She doesn't go through whole books of them like she did when we first met.  But we play a game once in a while.  I found this Sudoku Square game in Sedona, only to find out it really has nothing to do with sudoku at all, except for the name. Well, it looked like a cute puzzle anyway.  The idea is that each player gets a board and a set of pieces.  There are a bunch of dice with weird symbols.  Roll those dice and there's a setup phase that feels like Bingo: read off the letter and symbol on each die and put a stopper at that location. That's all the setup.  Now, just try to fit all those wooden pieces onto the board with the stoppers blocking those squares.  The rule book claims that there will ALWAYS be a solution, but I don't see how they guarantee that at all. Still, it took me about four minute to solve the first one, and Anne got hers, too.  For some reason, the second puzzle only took me about thirt...

On the way to work last thursday or friday, the guys on my usual morning radio show were talking about the winners of this year's Toy Hall of Fame.  It was their job to be entertaining and silly, and a bit outraged by each other's choices.  Here they are. https://rock1053.iheart.com/featured/follow-along-with-the-show/ They raised the same questions that always come up when so many activities have to be grouped together.  Do board games count as toys?  A "toy" should be something you (especially the younger version of you) can play with -- do whatever you want to do, make something up, entertain yourself.  We don't really play "with" a board game.  We just play the game.  But that means following rules and trying to reach win conditions.  It's a different feel altogether. The winners this year show how hard it is to classify our hugely creative range of activities.  Then were: Battleship (which started as a pencil and paper game), slime, and ...

We found this one at the State Park gift shop in Borrego Springs.  I did a quick read of the rules a few days back, and it seemed very simple. It was even more simple than that.  Players take turns flipping cards face-up onto a central pile.  If you see a dog and its matching owner come up back-to-back, slap (or "pound") the deck and take all the cards. Aside from the three special cards, that's all there is to it.  Those special cards are: - Dog Catcher = take the stack but leave the dog catcher as the start of the next stack - Dog Biscuit = first player to pound the deck takes it all - Fire Hydrant = add another card to the pile Last rule: if you pound the deck and the cards did NOT match, add an extra card to the pile.  Sometimes you get two of the same dog or owner and think it's a match.  Whoever ends up with all the cards is the winner. This would be fun for a while for some very young players.  There's nothing here to keep us entertained beyond ...

We have been playing some of those old Nonogram apps before bed lately.  Way more than we should, but I guess once you do ten levels, you might as well do 50 of them, right? Anyway, I like any kind of bonus levels that have a game within the game, and Nonogram.com currently has a "Rise & Dice" game in rotation which is essentially Snakes & Ladders.  You gain dice by playing the regular puzzles and have to get up to space 200 to win the mini-game challenge for the week.  It's a good little no-brainer.  Your overall progress against other players is shown in the tiny top bar, and you roll and go up ropes and fall down throuh portals.  There are tiny gift boxes on some spaces that give you 2-3 more dice.  When you win any daily or weekly challenge, the Nonogram.com app gives an attractive trophy for your shelf in the main game. We have each beaten it a few times.  It's kinda fun mumbling the die roll needed to avoid the traps and get to the next u...

On our Sedona trip, I hooked up that new retro game box and poked at it for about an hour.  Since we have been binge-watching the original Addams Family series, I showed Anne the crude old Fester's Quest game.  It starts with him chilling on a roof or patio somewhere, and a UFO lands and starts messing up the place.  Fun. After my last comment about how none of the creatures or details have any info or backstory, I found the original game manual on archive.org. Even then, the creatures are barely mentioned.  There are globules that sit there and skeeters who spin off mosquitos that bite you.  There is an inventory screen with more items than I was expecting, including light bulbs and a noose that will summon Lurch to wipe out all on-screen enemies. It's a shame that the main game play is so terribly slow, and the Continue option takes you back to the start.  You get to keep your items, but there is no way to run or sprint.  Just walk walk walk.  ...

We had another fun gaming afternoon with Chris & Carol.  We looked at a bunch of their games and brought four of our own.  I had to reread the rules for all four to make sure I could introduce them properly.  We finally picked the cute Super Kawaii Animals game.  We had previously only played this with 2 people, so I wondered if it would be any different with 4.  The main difference was: with 2 players most of the cards are still there on your next turn, so you get to plan ahead a bit.  With 4 players, by the time my turn rolled around again, almost all the cards had changed, so whatever plan I had was ruined. We played two games, and Chris won both.  The first time was funny, since I was mostly in teaching mode and barely looked at my own cards, so I ended up my lowest score ever ... 11 points minus 4 unfed pets.  Chris, meanwhile scooped up his third bunny on his very last play, fed it, grabbed a 7 point bunny house, and outscored the rest o...

This is an interesting card game.  The deck has tunnel cards,  two home cards, and a batch of cat cards.   You set up a 4x4 grid of cards on the table and start with the two home cards and any two cat cards placed as shown in the tiny rule book. Then, each turn has two possible moves: rotate a tunnel card or take a tunnel card from the edge, push all cards in the row or column to fill the empty space, and add the new card. The goal is to build a path of tunnel cards from a cat to a home.  Take the cat card and score it later.  That's it. It was a fun session, with an unusual feel.  A few times, we accidentally connected a home to the other home or a cat to the other cat.  Duh.  But it was easy to learn.  A little too often, your move will just set up the other player to finish a path in their next move.  It's hard to really hide a path that's almost done. This could be a keeper or another donation, hard to tell.  We should try ...

We found a copy of Doodle Dice at a thrift shop in Black Canyon City.  It looked like it would be a Yahtzee style game but with shapes instead of numbers,  and that was exactly right. There was a bit of a twist though.  The box we got only had five dice when there should be six.  This was not much of a problem though.  Just take out the purple cards, the only patterns that use all six dice.  The game played just fine with five. Some of the patterns on the cards are really cute.  The game is just a matter of rolling and rerolling dice and trying to match one of the face up cards.  First player to score one of each color of card wins. The rules had some gaps, from the feel of it.  They said you can't have more than one card of the same color in your "hand", but many hands go by before the color you need comes up and I can't see not scoring some other  cards until then.  Maybe the game should end when a player gets all 5 (supposed to b...

On our trip back from Sedona to San Diego, we took some backroads to avoid crowds.  There's really no alternate route except Interstate 17, but there are some exits with small towns where unusual items might show up. We started off in Lake Montezuma.  There's a little shop next to the building that says Post Office (but hasn't been a post office in years), across from the Beaver Creek Inn.  I'm not sure it had a name, and there was such a frenzy of Halloween decoration we're not sure we'd recognize the place again.  But it said "Little Bit Of This, Little Bit of That, New $ Thrift Store" out front.  There was a surprising variety of things here, from games to books, plush animals, 3-for-$1 stickers, cards and more.  The game section caught my eye with 3 different editions of Fluxx.  There were some funny spawns of Cards Against Humanity, including Kids Aginst Maturity and Stoners Against Sanity, plus a range of small card games.  We grabbed Gloom ...

We were at the Ranger Station at the Crane Petroglyph Site near Montezuma's Well (yeah, we end up in the darndest places) and we saw this on one of the tables: While more of a kid's activity sheet than a game, it's actually a very clever merging of a nature quiz and a maze.  For each question, the two answers have arrows pointing to two separate paths.  All the wrong answers point back to the "Are You Sure?" box in the center, but there is only so much space on one sheet of paper. A neat little diversion.  I wonder what deeper versions could be constructed, or whether any attempt will get too cluttered to be usable. Footnote: Montezuma's Well was closed due to the government shutdown.