ScottVee Gaming

In the cavernous back room downstairs at the Warm Hearth, they had a big display of games, including a giant Connect-4, a stack of 1-player Shut the Box games, a game called Disk Dash, and a public table where players can test those out. We have covered Shut the Box before  where our local boba shop has a 4-player version people like to diddle around with, and we have a 2-player one at home that we don't remember where we got it.  This time, it was a one-player version on display, and a copy set up with rules where you can sit and play it.  The rules were the same as we remembered: roll the dice, get a number, and flip down the any combination of numbers that add up to your total.  So if you roll a 3+4, any combination that equals seven can be flipped down.  Play until you can't flip another number, then your score for the round is the total of all your unflipped numbers.  Low score wins. Of course, the Wikipedia page for Shut the Box has name var...

As much as I find Monopoly clones tiresome and annoying, when we're in a small town somewhere and find their own small town rendition of the game, those are fascinating.  They are usually funded by advertising of local businesses, and have a very nostalgic feel, like they're from a parallel dimension where everyone cares about their community. Our hotel in Julian had a copy of Julianopoly.  The box was beaten up and it was a bit sad to see all the houses and game pieces were missing.  We could still enjoy the cards and board.  Everything in the box was a jumbled mess, so while we couldn't play the actual game, we made a game out of sorting it all out for the next person who opens the box. It felt like there was way too much play money in this edition, but we got it all organized.  This edition was made by Pride Distributors, 1989.  Sponsored by the Julian High School Eagle Booster Club.  The Chance and Community Chest cards were turned into Fat...

Here is an idea of just how many games can be found in Julian.  They're everywhere ... Two cabinets at the hotel with other drawers of games not shown: Right next door is the Julian Toy Chest ... The Wolf Center across the street still has Forest Animal Opoly . There are more games at the Miner's Diner.  These are vintage games in small tins, from the New York Historical Society.  They have a whole wall of other games, including miniature editions.  See the wall of miniatures shown up above. Games at the Warm Hearth.  This is just their main game display, just shelf 2 out of 3.  They have more games in a huge room downstairs. Interesting note: the worker at the Toy Chest told some tales of a kind of rivalry between some of the shops in town, trying to outsell or underprice each other.  There are more games at the Julian Garage.  Here's a neat tic-tac-toe game made of shot glasses. And here is their main game area, with more around the corners and ...

Julian Game Trip #4: Sentence Cube Fail We took a moment to sit down with the Scrabble Sentence Cube Game, but were immediately unimpressed.  I would expect something smarter or at least more reasonable from the Scrabble people.  Here, you get a timer and 21 or 24 cubes with short words on them -- you roll the dice and try to build a little crossword puzzle of sentences using those words. It's a classic in one sense, and a classic fail in another.  It didn't help that we had only 19 cubes. The choice of words is so limited, the best you can make is a half-assed attempt at being clever or funny. We don't do timers, due to Anne's tremors.  And heck, I don't like timers either.  We generally take games with timers and make them a cooperative challenge.  Nobody needs to lose ... we just have fun solving the puzzle. With this one, we were bored right away.  We tried to make the longest sentence we could, but the choice of words was hopeless.  "You do m...

One of the items in  the drawers at the Julian Gold Rush Hotel that caught our eyes was a vintage Old Maid game.  It had cards that looked old in a deluxe glossy box, but when we looked closer, it was a fairly recent printing just pretending to be vintage. The cards themselves were unusually thick, on a sort of pasteboard material, nothing like the thin cardstock that actual games of the 1920s-30s were printed on.  The rule card looked deliberately aged. A little label on the inside of the box read:  Victorian Trading Co Manufacturer: Wenzhou Success Group Co Ltd Location: Wenzhou, China Date: Nov  011 (I assume 2011) Batch: 1000 0862 So, yeah, nice try but it's not going to fool anyone who has any familiarity with actual game history. Still, Old Maid is a classic game.  Deal out all the cards, then players take turns grabbing a card from the player to their left and playing a pair if they have one.  Whoever ends up with the Old Maid card (the only car...

On our unexpected Julian game week, we pulled this beaten-up old box out of one of the drawers full of games.  It was a "Squzzle Puzzle" from Mindware (2000), with a theme of Animal Babies.  It was confusing at first until one side of the box pointed out that there are three separate 3x3 puzzles inside.  Here they are, separated out ... This felt like it would be a no-brainer.  A 3x3 grid puzzle for kids, right?  And with three puzzles, we could each start working on one, and figure out the other one later, right?  But it went sideways almost right away.  There are 9 cards with 4 possible rotations, so is that 9^4 combinations or 4^9?  Times the number of arrangements of the 3x3 grid itself.  We got near solutions where only the very last card failed, but that's no solution at all.  Trying to find a match for a particular spot, I naturally started reading the sides clockwise, so I might be looking for a bear-butt rabbit-head (in that ord...

We did not plan to have a 3-day game festival in Julian.  But it turns out that our hotel (the Julian Gold Rush Hotel) is also a gaming museum of sorts.  Who knew?  Their various parlors have shelves of games and puzzles, then drawers full of more of them.  A fine treasure trove including items we've never seen before.  We just booked a few nights to get away from work on some much-needed PTO, and found ourselves surrounded with games.  Beyond that, every shop in town has more games, from all time periods. We couldn't have planned it better.  If we found some official game trip, it would probably be mostly the modern complex games we don't enjoy.  This was a collection of old and mysterious things, sprinkled with classics. The first table we sat at, waiting for our room to be ready, had Sorry Madagascar edition and an old wooden Shut the Box game.  The shelf behind us had two Scrabbles, Sentence Cube, Clue Silver Line, Julianopoly, "The Coupl...

Ever since I saw the cover to that Chihuahua-Opoly game , I thought the main dog would look good as a nonogram puzzle.  It turns out that it would take much higher resolution to capture the kind of detail needed for this, but I was able to build this similar image in 20x22 size.   It came out chunky, but still had enough character to hit Save and add it to my collection.  I called it "Chi pup".  You can solve this puzzle at Nonograms Katana . And here is Anne looking at the actual playthrough of the puzzle. It's not as cute as the one I did of Dory, but it's fun creating new things when I get the chance.  Yes, that's Dory passed out by her feet, dressed up as a pumpkin for Halloween week. ;-)

Well, this is just nuts.  I wanted a quick look at the art styles on some of these other games in the "100 Cozy Games" series.  Here's a tiny piece of "100 Marshmallow Cats". Yes, the art in this one is easier on the eyes.  Lower contrast, not just staring at a full-bright white screen.  I suppose I could turn down the screen brightness on these. The cats are not doing normal cat things in this series of games.  A cat sitting on a pillow would be too easy.  Instead, they take the place of leaves and petals and roof shingles or candles or whatever.  I added a white arrow to show one of them.  Heck, you can barely see the arrow at first, much less all the little eyeballs peering out from every surface. I'm trying to mentally figure out whether games like these would be fun to build, or maddening. The purist side of my brain will tell me these are not really games, but puzzles.  Right now, I'm just looking on Steam and Itch and finding a world o...

"100 Romantic Cats" was a fun little hidden items game we tried on Steam about 2 months back.  It's part of a whole series of "100 Cozy Games".  This series is out of control, just the games with cats have 100 Candy Cats, 100 Chernobyl Cats (not cute at all), 100 Blacksmith Cats, 100 Bakery Cats, 100 Italy Cats ... on and on with about 250 of these listed on Steam right now. Each level is a separate game ... or is each game a level? The pure black on glaring-white layout hurt my eyes after about 15 minutes, but we were mostly done by then.  The overall art and UI is cute.  There was fun music and plenty of different meows to discover.  I'm tempted to try one of the games with less high-contrast art, for my ongoing eye strain issues. On the funny side, it turns out that every cat you find actually has a name, and you cat see them all as little achievements on Steam. These games are currently $1.99 each with a variety of bundles, from 3 games for $8.37 or 9 of...

We get an hour or two each weekend to hop on the gaming PC at my house, and we mostly play Matt's Cats these days.   Here is Part One . Somehow, clicking all the things and seeing all the gags never gets tired.  There are quirky dialogs in between levels, unusual sound f/x, hidden cards with fan art, profiles of their fictional creatures, and bits from sketchbooks.  The devs really poured their hearts into this project. But we're getting close to the end at this point.  We didn't notice that the 12 worlds vaguely follow the months of the year until world 10 was full of Halloween and world 11 got extra snowy. Here are some of the sights and sounds.   There's a huge map that's an internet cafe from Hell (note, the chairs roll around), a ghastly green level where they ask you if it gave you a headache (yes!), seascapes, maze levels lit only by a spotlight effect, you never know what's coming next.  Seas of blood?  Volcanos?  Sure. The only ...

In a  previous post,  I talked about how much we enjoyed the mini-zine-game Cat Distribution System by Jessika Rocha.  It ended by saying we were going to start drafting up some rules for the "Adoption Center" expansion that was in my head. Since then, it has gone through a few revisions and is in its final draft.  I contacted Jessika, creator of the original CDS game, and she said she liked it and it would be okay for us to upload it to Itch as an official expansion. Here is a shot of our last round of playtesting on Sunday...   I ended up designing a 3-page PDF of optional Player Sheets.  You can print these out to help you track and organize your cat rescues and adoptions.  The photo shows page one of our rules, plus the original CDS (black-and-white print) and the Player Sheets in action.  I found that I like to write development notes for our game projects as they are being worked on.  I think it adds a little value telling the extr...

This is an odd one we found at a community sale a few weeks ago.  Quads looked interesting, but it started annoying us right away.  After seeing what was in the box, we could never get it to fit back in the box again.  Tonight, we tried to play it, but the rules on the back of the box were so tiny, I couldn't read them even with my reading glasses on.  Yeah, they packed about 10 languages on there and made them all unreadable.  Then, when I did get a photo using the phone and zoomed in until it WAS readable, it was full of typos and translation fails, and still managed to sound incomplete. We tried to play the game using those fragments of rules, and yeah ... if they had used four actual colors, it would have been a no-brainer.  We could have started making moves with some confidence and sense of exploration.  But instead, they went with Black, Gray, White Ribbed Vertically and White Ribbed Horizontally, and Anne never did catch on to the ribbed patter...