ScottVee Gaming

We took a crack at Looting Atlantis today, and really could not get into it.  On the box it sounded like  you place lava tokens and grab cards before the city burns down.  In actual practice, putting those 4 cards on every board space took up a lot more room than expected, and then the rules missed a lot of situations. Even how to place a lava token was not described well.  It was either "on the next space in a lane" or "moving out across city spaces" or you could start a new lava lane.  This could have been described as simply "on a space with a red triangle or next to any space that already has lava on it." We didn't see the note that for two players, you should place two lava tokens at the start of each turn, then take your two moves.  Or the note that after the lava hits a city space, you take three moves per turn for the rest of the game. We saw that the cards had special scoring rules and effects written on them, but they were a bit hard to read....

Anne's family had another gathering, and while we were still waiting for people to get there, I noticed the game Skyjo sitting on top of the usual stack of games.  I didn't think about it until after pizza, when a cousin said she found this neat new game on a trip to Guatemala.  The same Skyjo that we discovered a few weeks ago.  That was an odd coincidence, stumbling on the same game just a few weeks apart but in different countries.  Anyway, I covered Skyjo here , when we played it with just two. One of the players said it reminded her of Nine Cards Down, which we covered here  . The main difference was that Skyjo has simple numeric Uno-style cards one a 3x4 grid where Nine Cards Down uses regular playing cards in a 3x3 grid.  But yes, there were similarities. Since we could not get away before the gaming broke out, we ended up playing Skyjo with 7 players.  In my mind I wondered how much table space you would need for the full 8 players listed on th...

Butterfly Garden is a gorgeous hexagonal tile placing game.  I grabbed it because it reminded me a bit of Tsuro , but with a nature theme.  The game designed was Reiner Knizia, a name that sounded familiar ... I turns out he also created Botswana, which we reviewed recently . Among hexagonal tile placement path-building games, for simplicity Tsuro would win every time.  But there is a lot of room for variety.  In Butterfly Garden, the players have sections at the edge of the board marked as their "flower beds", and there are six fountain tiles around the edges that each start with one blue butterfly, and one tile in the middle where the remaining six butterflies start with the purple one flying last. As you place tiles, you try to guide butterflies to you own flower bed, then score them by placing them behind your player screen.  The blue butterflies count as one point each, pink scores two and the solos purpler butterfly scores 3. After the first few moves, the...

At our regular boba place, one of the owners brought in yet another odd game for customers to play with.  This one looked vaguely familiar but had no markings at all, no brand or name.  The lady who brought it in said she didn't remember what it was, either.  The place was busy and there wasn't a chance to ask more about it. It was a wooden box with a grid of holes on all four upright sides and about twenty plastic sticks pushed through those holes.  With the sticks in place, it left room for five or six wooden balls at the top.  Clearly, the goal is to either bring balls to the bottom or prevent the same. I was able to find the same exact game on Amazon and Temu, but with such generic names that they are clearly knock-offs of something else.  They were called things like Ballfall and Montessori Drop Game.  I do not link to sites that are full of knock-off games. Now, if you Google the phrase "game with balls and sticks poked through holes" the top con...

I was trying to burn through the last of my birthday gift cards this week and stopped at Barnes & Noble again.  Gotta go where the gift cards take you.  I got book 7 of the Expanse and a little card game called Skyjo.  I almost didn't pick it up because it looked like Uno without the fun cards, or just another Skip Bo.  I watched a how-to-play video last night and Skyjo sounded like a quick learn.  We brought it to the hotel where we were planning to stay out of town on July 4th to avoid the fireworks noise that always upsets the dog. Again, the hotel had no place to actually play a board game.  There was a table about two foot by four but with only one chair.  Again, we thought about gaming at one of the tables down in the lobby, but then people would walk by and ask bothersome questions. It turns out that Skyjo can be played by two players on a firm hotel bed.  Each players gets 12 cards, which they put face down in a grid of 3 rows, 4 colu...

We got to play a round of Wooly Wars in the back yard today, under the shady canopy.  Our little round table was barely big enough to hold it, and the last few tiles had to be put somewhere else because we ran into the edge.  Here is the BGG page . This is a simple tile-placing game, trying to build the largest enclosed sheep pen of your color.  You oddly start off without showing which color you are playing. A sheep pen is enclosed by fences or forests, and if a wolf is placed in that adjacent forest, all connected pens are threatened, though a hunter tile can cancel out a wolf tile.  In the end, the protected pen with the largest population wins. There are some odd extra rules that happen in the middle of the game, like exposing which color you are playing.  With two people, it felt irrelevant.  Then there is the shepherdess tile that lets you change colors, also irrelevant.  You can also choose to stop placing tiles and take a bonus; I think the fir...

This was just hilarious.  It's a very simple game for kids, but one of the cutest ideas we have seen in a while.  Your goal is to collect five different colors of acorns.  You spin the spinner, and it says to either pick an acorn of a specific color, or 1 or 2 acorns of your choice, or steal one, or lose a turn.  That's all. There is a large squirrel prop in the box, and it turns out to be a big pair of pliers.  You use that thing to pick up the acorns in its squirrely hands and put them into the matching color holes in your stash. The presentation of the game in its big tree-shaped box with all the colorful pieces and pet squirrel inside -- it made us feel like kids again. That's the whole game, but the game was so darn cute, it was hard not to chomp on Anne's fingers with that big squirrel toy.  This one is going straight to the 4-year-old grand-niece (sort of) who needs a squirrel to play with.     The squirrel even helped us put the pieces bac...

After a two-day trip to Temecula found no worthwhile games in any thrift shops, and no game shops in the area, we hit a jackpot on the way back from a haircut in Vista today.  The Goodwill shops in Temecula had hardly any games of any kind, and a disgruntled guy explained how they "sell everything good on their website these days," but the Goodwill in Vista says otherwise. We found Chickapig (which looked like a strategic piece-moving game), Shut the Box (because we've mentioned it a few times recently), a rudimentary molecule model kit (my house feels oddly empty without one ... once every few years) and the Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game! (which qualifies as a WTF find). Then we went to Pair-a-Dice games again, because the Leggs gave me a gift certificate at my birthday party.  Of course I overdid it.  Gift certificate times 5.  These days, one of the challenges in shopping for games is trying not to buy something that's just an expansion you can't use.  There ...

We finally got to play Diced Veggies at a hotel room.  Sadly, while the preview photos of the room showed a long desk, there was only one chair, so there was no comfortable place to try a new game. Boy, this does not work on a bed.  The main gimmick is to set up the 35 dice in the square frame and trim off some dice with the cardboard cleaver.   You start with two recipe cards and a booster card.  Basically, each turn you try to carve out some dice you need from the grid of dice and match the colors to the colors in one of your recipe cards.  If you can match the numbers or sums on a booster card, you score those points too.  As I recall, at the end of a turn there is a max of two recipe cards, two booster card, and 8 dice that you can keep.  The rest have to be discarded.  The dice go back into the rectangular frame.  And when you complete a recipe, those dice also go back into the grid.  Each card scores around 4-5 points. Each pl...

This is a card game version of Boop, which we reviewed here . We had vague recollections that the original Boop was cute but confusing.  It was hard to visualize the moves when each cat or kitten played booped the tiles around it. Boop Shuffle perfectly catches that same confusing feel in a tiny deck of cards.  It is still for two players only.  There are two little rolled up strips that you can put down at right angles to represent the edges of a 6x6 game board.  The original Boop was much better in this respect, with the cute "turn the box into a bed" motif. Here, you still try to get three kittens/cats in a row to promote the kittens to cats, thought it's done in an obtuse way by putting the promoted cats into the discard pile.  So they will be available the next time the discard pile is shuffled into a new draw pile.  It was a bit disappointing just drawing a card and playing it, even if it's the other player's cat. There are a few variant cats, and one...

A few more quick finds: We stopped at B&N last weekend with some leftover birthday gift cards and found a few small games that looked like they were worth trying.  We also made mental notes on a few larger games, only to watch videos and find they were way more complex than we wanted.  I'm not going to stand there in the store and look for reasons not to buy, or pester them with second-hand tales of sales from halfway around the country.  If I can't remember the game by the time I get home, then it didn't make much of an impression. These days, to trigger the "buy" impulse, a game needs to sound like it has a quick setup, only a few pages of rules, and hopefully some new game mechanic that hasn't been done to death, although cute cats and dogs will score big points. Anyway, we found Boop Shuffle and Diced Veggie.  Boop Shuffle was obviously a card game version of Boop, which we already reviewed and found both cute and perplexing. Diced Veggies boasted a ga...

We ran two rounds of Splendor this weekend.  I had watched a gameplay video the night before , so I had a good idea of how it would play out. But when we finally set it up and started playing, we found that the available choices were a lot trickier than I thought they would be. The setup is as shown here ... it's a 5x4 grid with five patron tiles at the top, then there are blue, yellow, and green decks where you place the deck face down on the left and turn four cards face up next to that.  There are the five types of heavy gem chips and a stack of gold chips ... these all feel like the heaviest poker chips we have ever tried to pick up.  Nice solid pieces and colorful artwork Game play sounds simple.  There are only a few options: - take one each of three different gems - take two of one color gem if there are at least four gems left in that pile - buy a card for the gem cost shown - stash a card in your hand by taking a card and a gold token That last option felt...

Botswana was a birthday gift -- it seems like everyone in Anne's family figured out that we enjoy animal-based games.  This one is a card game, and it's colorful and simple, but catchy. I can only talk about the two-player game, since we hardly ever get out to game with other people.  The setup is simple: put the five batches of five animals on the table, set aside two cards, shuffle the rest and deal out all the cards.  There's a scoring board with numbers running from 1 to 50, and each player gets a blank score token and another token with 50 on one side and 100 on the other side. The turns are simple: each player plays a card and takes an animal.  The cards are numbered from 0 to 5 and are played vertically below the animal stacks.  You can take any animal; it doesn't matter which card was played.  When the sixth card is played for any animal, the round is over.  Then, the top card (last card played) for each animal gives the point value of that ani...

Sometimes, we will grab games for younger players because they have a youthful simplicity that we like.  There's a whole younger player section at Barnes & Noble where we have found some curious and amusing games over the years, including Cat Crimes, the very first post we ever did here .   We did a test run of Smokey Bears: Happy Camper today, and while the production and design is well done, with a whole 3-d camper you can build, the game itself has nothing to it.  You choose an activity card which has icons of 7 items, then you find those 7 tokens, throw in 5 animals tokens and scramble them up.  Put those face down on the board.  From there you spin the stiff little spinner and move, and if you land on the compass you flip one or two tokens.  Items go on your camper, animals go in the five "Animal Friend" spaces at the top of the board.  If you get the 7 items first, you win. What's odd about this one is, it says it's cooperative bu...

So I had my 60th birthday, and a party was arranged ... and survived.  Mostly gift cards for Barnes & Noble, which does have games.  Here is the haul as of today: Botswana was a gift.  Splendor was actually from work, from the weird Recognition program they have where you can send points to coworkers -- I had 110 points saved up which are worth about a buck each, and this was listed for 17 points and arrived the very next day. The rest were from B&N.  It was really annoying that I didn't notice the Command of Nature one was just an expansion set to a game we don't own ... so that's useless, but it was $10 on the cheap table.  The other two look good.  Will test them out when we get a chance. I also made mental notes of some of the games that looked good, like Botany, and took some pics of what was on their discount table.  Came home and watched some videos about those, and they just seem too complicated for our current lifestyle, or require d...

At the Julian Toy Chest, there were a few games in a series of "1 player puzzle games."  I was able to pass up some of them, but how could I say no to Cats & Boxes with a cute cover like this? We don't normally do one player games, or games that are actually puzzles (not games).  But the very first things I blogged here was Cat Crimes, which, while it was supposed to be multiple players taking turns doing puzzles, we just played all the puzzles together.  And in this case, a fresh set of puzzle to play together sounded like fun. This one is very simple.  There is a 5x5 game board, 5 cats, and 4 irregular tiles with empty boxes attached.  The puzzle book has sixty puzzles ranging from simple to expert (like usual for these types of games).  Here, the feel of the puzzles is unlike anything we have played before. Follow the layout of the puzzle in the puzzle book -- just setup the board as shown.  Then you are given a minimum number of moves.  Ea...

I got a day of PTO for my birthday, so we drove up to Julian hoping the place wasn't so madly crowded on a Friday.  It worked.  We got there at about 10:30am and I don't think we saw even 50 people while we were there.  We weren't planning on looking for games, but they do have a way of finding us.  We always have to stop at the Toy Chest ... this time they had a few neat little games we had not seen before.  And a copy of Shut the Box which I just blogged about last night. After lunch at the Miner's Diner (really good reuben and some cream cheese pickle balls), we went into the Old Julian Garage next door.  The Garage is actually an eclectic gift shop full of mostly hot sauces and beer collector items.  They have a lot of games, but mostly smart-aleck gags and drinking games involving puns and crude language.   Still, we came home with these:  

Our local Ding Tea place had a new board game set up when we stopped by last weekend.  Previously, they had a variety of Jenga games and those hook and ring games I wrote about a while back.  This time it was Shut the Box, which I have seen before but never got to tinker with. It was a square game board where each side had little wooden pegs marked 1 to 10, all set up so you can flip them up or down.  The game involves rolling the 2 dice and then flipping any combination of pegs that add up to the number rolled.  You keep rolling until you can't flip another peg, and then score the sum of the unflipped pegs.  Lowest scroes wins.  Aside from a few tiny extra rules like only rolling one die if the highest remaining peg is 6 or less, that's it for rules. There was a nice big rulesheet printed and laminated, suggesting a few variations.  If you manage to flip all the pegs ("shut the box"), you win that round immediately.  I suppose you can keep a r...

I was running through my lists of old website logins last weekend, and eliminated a bunch where the sites had long-since disappeared.  I was surprised to see one of the old gaming sites (where I used to spend a lot of my pre-midnight hours) was still up and running.  As far as I could tell, nothing had changed, not the logo or layout or anything else I could recall from years ago. ItsYourTurn.com is a "turn based gaming" site, where you can play board games and card games with players all over the world by starting a game and then waiting for the other player(s) to take their turns.  When you log in, you will see the list of all games where it's your turn (thus the site name), and click through those turns, then either look for more games to start, or just go to bed. It was funny so see that I joined in 2004, played over 1000 games, and have not made a turn since Jan 2016.  Most sites will kick you off or disable your login if you don't stay active enough, but this ...

We finally got around to playing "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", the one we got on our Sedona trip on Halloween.  It felt a little off playing it in February, but we love all the Peanuts characters and the original shows, and Snoopy is still a go-to winner when we buy greeting cards for each other. Anyway, when I grabbed this, I thought it was the original for some reason.  One glance at the box should have been enough.  That swirly game board with paths crossing underneath other paths is distinctive.  This company did a similar re-issue for the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer game.  From what I remember, the original Great Pumpkin game had a fairly simple path around the board where player pick cards from the pile, and have to complete the four cards that make up one of the characters to win.  Those "four or six cards makes a bigger picture games" were not uncommon in the 1970s -- games like Colombo did the same thing. This is just a roll-and-move g...