ScottVee Gaming

On the way back from our Ramona/Julian weekend, we checked our local Barnes & Noble for the 30% off sale people had been talking about on Facebook.  Nope.  Full price.  We could not resist Boop, because it sounded so simple.  And it had cats.  And booping. It turns out that it really is that simple, on the surface.  The game board is just a piece of fabric with puffy squares, but you can flip over the box bottom so the whole thing looks like a bed.  So, it's just cats fighting over space on a bed. Each player has 8 kittens and 8 cats.  You start by placing one kitten on any space, which boops all neighboring pieces one block away from the piece you placed.  Except if there's another piece blocking the boop.  And kittens cannot push adult cats.   When you get three cats or kittens in a line, remove those kittens and promote them to cats by setting aside the kittens and moving an equal number of cats into your pile of playabl...

Many years ago, I would meet up with Robert A. Kraus (RAKgraphics) each year when he came to town to setup his both at ComicCon.  We were always bouncing ideas around.   He had a series of mini games called Coin Creatures, where you use coins as your game pieces and his endless cute Creatures were all over the board. We put together a few full page games for that series.   Here is one called Reapers Challenge,  which guest starred Bob's famous Chakan character who was long ago featured in a Sega video game . For each of these projects we wanted to give as much play for the price as we could,  so we included another whole game board on the backside,  and some alternate rules.   As long as all the rules fit on one sheet of paper. This one is simple: move your pieces along the thick lines but capture by following the arrows.  The only other rules are: you can move any combination of pieces a total of seven spaces; you can't...

Here is a game we got a few weeks back at the thrift shop in Ramona.  Blokus gives you a big grid and each player gets a bag of tetris-shaped pieces.  You take turns putting pieces on the board, starting in the corner squares and only connecting to your existing pieces at the corners.  At first it felt like a simple game where you get as much territory as you can and block the other player in.  But a solid line of your pieces won't stop to other player if there's a corner they can expand on.  So it gets really interesting. With two players, I can't see any way we would not both get all our pieces down.  But there are a few rule variants on the little instruction sheet.  One said for one player to play blue and red and the other to play green and yellow, and we played them in alphabetical order.  That gave a much better feel for the game, and one by one the players got stuck.  When the last player is unable to move, everyone gets minus one poi...

 I'm sure that most Westerners, who grew up on chess and checkers and coloring books, and are told to always stay within the lines, will think of Tic Tac Toe when I mention a 3x3 board game.  Sure, if you want to stay inside the boxes, that's what a 3x3 grid looks like. But many games are played on the lines, not on the boxes.  So here is a basic 3x3 grid.    If you are still seeing a 2x2 grid, let me show where the pieces would go.   What makes this easily-drawn board so neat and compact, is that the lines show how and where the pieces can move. Technically, that simple board is used in a game called (not surprisingly) Nine Holes .  The basic rules for all games on this page: - each player gets three pieces, the pieces start off the board - take turns adding pieces to the board - once all pieces are on the board players can move one piece one square each turn.   - Winner is the first to get three in a row. It's not the most exciting thing, b...