ScottVee Gaming

We released our first print-and-play little RPG/simulator game on itch.io.  With "Therapy Dog Goes to the Con" you can roll up encounters with people at a sci-fi convention, where they can interact with your friendly little service dog -- we're sure the pup will make everyone feel better.  You can find the game here . Background story:   We have been working on this one for a few weeks now.  After years of taking a small service dog (Dory) with us everywhere and seeing how often she brightens the day for people, we realized there were patterns.  And as someone who enjoys making up random tables for RPGs that may or may exist, this was a good challenge for me. We tried dozens of print-and-play mini RPGs on Itch, and it felt like this game would fits a niche on the site.  Sure, there are journaling games and games full of d6 tables, and games about dogs, but this one has all of those things along with some real-world good feel.  Then, while on a trip to ...

After getting completely bogged down by Dog Lover  yesterday, we really needed a game where the cards aren't covered in rules and buffs and debuffs.  On some Facebook post yesterday, someone asked about whether some cat game (Calico?) was good or not, and one of the responses was to try Cat Between Us as it was super quick and awesome.  Something like that.  Thing is, we bought Cat Between Us a few months back, and when I read through the rules at the time, it seemed disappointingly complex like every other modern game we try. Then we watched Rodney at Watch It Played .  He described it so well, we could almost throw out the rules and just enjoy the game.  Look!  Each card just has a number.  No extra rules or exceptions or special powers in little tiny fonts.  A cat worth 2 points is a cat worth 2 points.  And it is beautifully simple while being just different enough that we had some figuring out to do.  All the little ...

I was excited when I saw that the makers of Cat Lady put out a game for dog lovers.  I got it using recognition points at work. I really looked forward to having it show up on my front step, then showing it to Anne, then setting it up and getting into it. Except ... it took all the annoying little details we did not like about Cat Lady and multiplied them into a crazy matrix of on-card gobbledygook. It added a new column of cards to represent "Tricks", which are actually patterns of which cards you can pick from the 3x3 grid at the heart of the game.  In Cat Lady, you just pick a row or column of 3 (except for the row or column marked with the cat token), then move the cat token to mark that column so the next players can't pull the same row or column.  In Dog Lover, the explanation of the Trick cards was weak, so we spent most of the game arguing every time about whether you can shift the dog up or down one, and which cards you could actually take. I think the actual rul...

We stopped at a community garage sale in San Marcos (CA) this morning, in a big string of apartment complexes off the train tracks.  They posted a flyer on Facebook last friday, and it said "Toys & Games", so I screenshotted it.  That has become the easiest way to remember stuff these days.  On the weekends, we can look at all the stuff I clipped and see if any events are worth doing. Driving by, it looked like just piles of clothes, but there was a little indoor community area, super hot and sweaty and crowded, with a couch piled high with games.  Most of them, we had already seen, or they were in the party game category we don't care for.  We picked up these items for a whopping $4.  So I finally have a Catan -- I kept skipping that one due to the dexterity  issue of trying to line up the little bits along those borders, not sure if Anne will want to do that.  But we have one we can tuck away for some future day. Those two little games were ...

I'm serious.  I sat down and (sort of) played a round of checkers with (sort of) Batman. This thing is a sculpture attached to a bench behind the main housing towers at Cal State San Marcos. First, he tried to tell me what piece to move, because he's a big bossy jerk. Then he tried to intimidate with this chilling stare. So I pretended to move this piece instead. Then I figured we should hit the road before he accused me of cheating.

Anne usually plays Canasta with some ladies in the mobile home park on Tuesdays.  Or if one can't make it, they end up playing dominos, Mexican Train. So, while I was having trouble sleeping and looked at one of my shelves and saw the box for "Random Fun Generator" by Steve Jackson Games, I vaguely remembered there was one in there that used dice as dominos. That game is Hexican Train.  Each player gets eight 6-sided dice, and two dice are used as the starting pattern.  Then, each turn, try to put two dice together into a "domino" and play it at the start or end of the line of dice.  If you can't play, pass your turn.  If both players pass, the hand is over: score one point for each die left in your hand. Add up the scores, and when a player reaches 10 points, the low score wins. It's quick and easy, and the worst I got was six dice left over after she played about four 4s in a row.  But we finished each set only 2 or 4 points apart. It might work for mo...

That's just a great title.  "The Most Tabletop Games per Square Centimeter by Andrew J. Young.  You can find this one-sheet game on itch.io .  It is priced at $5, which one could argue is crazy for one sheet of words, but there are ten ideas here that you can take and run with, and have an improv good time.  It was last updated on 5 Jun 2023. It does manage to fit 10 games on one sheet of paper.  The creator could have cheated by using incredibly small fonts, but these are all a reasonably readable size.  The challenge about discussing this is, if I quote even one sentence from any of these games, I will have given away a significant portion of the work.  I certainly can't post a screenshot, because that's all there is. Actually, there are more than ten ideas here.  The games themselves are a fun mix of themes and genres, where you can be animals or halflings or programs or regular joes, battling zombies or robots or the time cops.  Or r...

After trying Collapsi a few times and describing it last month , I ended up on itch.io and found a variety of "Play in Browser" versions of this little card game.  It's a surprisingly varied selection built in different tools with a range of design approaches. You can find them all with a quick search , and I'm sure more will be appearing.  Here are the ones I looked at: Collapsi by Wikiti.  Last update 18 Aug 2025. This was written using the Godot Engine, and covers the basics.  Play vs Player or Computer.  When its your turn, all cards you can land on are shown in red, which is a good visual aid. Collapsi by Mad Moon Interactive . Last update 13 Apr 2026 This one was made in Unity with a neat 3-d board layout floating far above the Earth.  Here, you click one card at a time to get where you want to go.  PVP only. CollapsiJS by Sentinel65 . Last update 22 Jul 2025. Made in Javascript.  This was has a dropdown to choose player color...

Here is a cozy little game from itch.io.  In The Tiniest Tea Shop (by SodaTree), you have a character with a shop, with a range of supplies, trying to give customers what they want.  This is all tied together by two short lists of 6 things each: the Emotions and Trials that we all go through.  I will be calling these Aspects. So, your shop owner has their own Emotion and Trial, the customers all have an Emotion and Trial, and the tea ingredients each relieve one Emotion or Trial.  The game itself is a simple but clever way to tie these all Aspects together with just a few d6 rolls.  The matching of Aspects has an effect on die rolls. The early version was a one-page game in the 1100 Word TTRPG Kitchen Jam, and that version works perfectly well.  In mid-2026, they added an expanded version with full-color art (so much pink), mostly the same rules but easier on the eyes, with a few additions. The itch.io page is here. Each day you get a magical delivery of he...

Here's a game we first found on itch.io when I was searching for cat games and finding whole Game Jams full of cat games.  Find Matt's Cats. Then we found it on Steam, right here . Of course, you can zoom.  I just wanted to show the overall scope of the typical level. Then we had way too much fun with the 10-level demo on Steam.  We were in the mood for a "find the objects" game, and this was one of the most enjoyable games of that sort we have seen, period.  The art is delightful, a world packed with objects and cats, and objects for more objects to hide in.  You can click to open up entire houses or buildings.  You can click the sea serpent to open a hidden pocket world under the sea.  You can roll logs or carts or boats out of the way to find more objects. Like usual, there is a fixed set of objects to find in each level.  Then there are 10-20 gems to find in each level, and finally, one piece of art -- these go into an album.  It's fun to...

Following up on the last post, I also got Skip Bo from burning some "recognition points" at work.  Skip Bo Junior has long been a favorite of ours -- a simple, catchy game with cartoon bugs on the cards.  I have long wondered what made it "Junior".  If that's junior, what did the original game look like? At first, the original Skip Bo felt weird to us, but then it felt so familiar we had to stop and think what the differences actually were.  Mainly, in Skip Bo, you get a stock of cards (30 each for 2 players, but we went with 20 for a shorter run), a hand of five cards, and four potential discard piles, and the goal is to get all of your stock pile onto the four build piles at the middle of the table. But that's also exactly what you do in Skip Bo Junior.  But is it?  In Junior, you divide the deck evenly after dealing the Stock piles to each player.  Then we take turns dealing one card onto each of the other player's discard piles, but that was our o...

As a follow-up to all those "Card Golf" games a few posts ago , I was trying to spend "recognition points" at work and saw the Play Nine actual card game come up, and I had to have it as a follow-up. It is exactly what we expected, an 8-card version of 6-card golf with custom cards.  The cards are numbered properly so you don't have to remember that queens are 11 or whatever.  The art is a perfect fit, with cartoon golf balls, and the 0-point card is a Mulligan. The differences from the core Card Golf rules I posted previously: 1. You deal out two rows of four cards and flip two 2. You cannot just draw a card and discard it, if you do you still have to flip one of your face-down cards to face-up 3. the scoring has vertical pairs still count as zero, but two pairs are -10, three for -15 and 4 for -20.  A pair of -5s counts -20, two pairs of -5s counts -30. And it gives you an official score pad with a little golf pencil for scoring. The game runs quickly, no surp...

We went up to the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim yesterday, on a last-minute "why not?" mission.  As always, I had terribly anxiety on I-5 driving up there, but we made it from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. before the heat and endless walking wore us out.  We did finally find the gaming room where there was a library of hundreds of games, and maybe 10 people at four tables players having a good time. As a quiet place to relax, it was perfect.  The first few games we took out turned out to have a minimum of 3 players, so, um, whatever.  Then I brought over "Here, Kitty Kitty!" and it was a winner.  Easy to learn, with friendly art and some good visual gags on the cards. You start by choosing a house tile with three spaces (Yard, Porch and House), and you dump the 40 plastic cats into the space between the houses, a.k.a. the "Neighborhood". Each turn, you get two actions out of 1. move a cat one space, 2. play a card, 3. discard up to 3 cards and draw ...

The is a cute one-page jam game I found on itch.io.  It can be printed on a single sheet of paper and folded into a little 8-page booklet that would fit into a regular deck of cards.  I have seen a few of these now, and they are both cute and clever.  The creator's playthrough video is here . Meow.  We sat down and played it on Saturday, ironically just a few hours after taking my cat Mango to the vet. Since all the rules had to fit on one sheet of paper, it wouldn't be expected to be hugely elaborate.  Instead, these games give such clever basic frameworks, you can imagine scenarios and expansions in your mind's eye.  Here, you make a basic character with a name and four d6 stats, and this character is going to wander around town looking for cats to rescue. Roll dice to pick a few odd items that you can maybe roleplay into the game.  Then roll 2d6 to see which part of town you're visiting and another 2d6 to see what you're doing in that part of town....

I was exploring more games on itch.io and came across the most amazing bundle ... their Games for Scholarships bundle offers 324 games for $10 or pay what you want.  I paid $40.  I was going to do a wacky number like $43.21 but it only takes $5 increments.   These are mostly small games, and entries into one-page or one-day design contests, but still, I will gladly give them $2-$3 individually, so this is unbeatable.  I look for the ones with strange topics and quirky humor.  Things I have not seen so many times before.  And boy are there some unique things in here. I will quote their main pitch here: "Funds raised will provide scholarships for underserved youth participating in the Games for Change Student Challenge, a global game design competition that invites students ages 10-25 to create original digital and tabletop games about issues impacting their communities." I have already read PDFs for 4NC13ENTS, The Uninvited Guest, Finals (an arcane co...

We figured it would be good to look at all those apps for Card Golf games to see what the "core rules" really are.  A developer isn't going to spend so much of their time just to code some weird, unpopular, unknown variation.  There is definitely a pattern. There are 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10 cards layouts.  We could just as easily deal out 12 like in Skyjo. Every app asks each player to flip two cards face up to start the game.  A few start with a peek at the bottom row of cards.  The ones with the peek are more likely to be memory games where you don't expose cards until you finally go out at the end.  That is not a play style we enjoy, so we moved along. The default scoring is: Ace = 1, 2-10 = face value, J & Q = 10, K = 0.  Jokers are -2 if included.  If not, score the twos as -2 instead.  Vertical pairs or triples (in the 9-card version) cancel out and score 0. The game flows better when you can discard without revealing one of your face-dow...

Continuing from last time, here are more Card Golf android apps... 5. The next Android app we found was " Card Golf & 31: Scat Cards " by Gameyantra.  Last updated Aug 11, 2026.   This developer has over a dozen other games, including one that runs 14 popular card games from India. This one will play 4, 6, or 8 card games.  It had good basic game play but the screens rendered a little larger than the actual screen, so when I went to any Settings page there was no way to get back to the home page -- I had to restart each time.  You can go ad free forever for $0.99, or watch one ad for 60 minutes ad-free, but it can't keep getting stuck. 6. Next was " Golf Card Game " by JoshsGames.com Last updated June 14, 2026.  This app will play 4, 6 or 9 card games with 6, 9 or 18 holes.  Unlike most of the others, you can set the card speed, and choose whether or not to peek at the bottom row of cards.  There are 12 computer "players" to choose f...

After reviving many variations of Six-Card Golf (and Four and Nine card games) in my previous post, we went looking for Android apps to play them together. 1. We tried " The Golf Card Game " by Glowing Eye Games This ran a Four Card Game against two computer players and you could kill ads permanently for $2.99.  It was fairly solid but limited.  There were no real settings or options to play with.   2. Next came " Play Nine: Golf Card Game " by Bonfit This was also a solid play, and it had the best range of options, from single player to a Play With Friends mode where you create a room with 2-4 players over 3-9 holes, also Tournament and Multiplayer and an endless Journey from course to course.  It only did Eight Card Golf. But the ads were relentless after almost every hand, at could only be removed by a $12.99/year "club membership".  No.  $3-5 is fair for these.  I'm not going to be charged 11 months from now for something I forgot I ever downl...