ScottVee Gaming

We did a quick run through CVS to pick up some NyQuil and DayQuil a few weekends ago, and Anne always likes to go through the "fun aisle" on the way out.  That's the aisle with gifts and "As Seen on TV" stuff and weird random items.  This time there was one little card game on the shelf.  Just one.  It was Ninja Cat Cucumber Attack, by Moon Sprocket Games. It had cats, so we figured we should try it. When I flipped through the little rule sheet, I was disappointed to see yet another "slap the card" game.  But we had a chance to sit outside under the gazebo this afternoon and give it a shot. Yes, it's a slap-the-card game, like the basic game of War but with cats and more variety.  Start by dividing the deck equally, and whoever gets all the cards is the winner.  Take turns throwing down one card each.  If you see two of the same number or cat or weapon, you can slap the deck and take the whole pile.  Or a "sandwich" of two matching cards ...

We were at an small family gathering last night and after dinner,  the board games started to come out.  The group decided on Sequence, so we pulled out that big game from a badly smooshed box and tried to get the kinks out of it.  They tried a blow dryer,  even talked about putting it in the dryer to flatten out.  But in the end we just laid it out and started playing, and avoided the bumps as best as we could. The mat shows card patterns, with two of each card laid out in a maddening disarray.   The game itself is simple enough, just discard a card each turn and put a chip on a matching card space on the big game mat.  You start with six cards and always draw a new card after playing one.  The goal is to get two sequences of five in a row of your color.  There are a few other rules: - if all spaces for one of your cards have been taken,  that's a dead card and you can trade in for a different (hopefully playable) card a...

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 ...

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 ...

Time to try yet another Fluxx game.  It's hard to believe it took them 20 years to think up "cats" as a theme.  Sure, most of their past editions were sci-fi and fantasy.  Can't go wrong with cats, though. It played as expected, with some pretty funny goals and actions.  I like the "cat distribution system" action, where a player with more than 2 cats in front of them has to give cats to players with no cats.  Because everyone needs cats. Some of our usual gripes about Fluxx came to light.  When there too many rules, it all slows to a halt.  We really don't like reading a ton of text on a ton of cards to figure out what moves to make.  When there are less than 3 rules in play, it all flows nicely.  Maybe 3 will still work.  But when there are rules to exchange cards, swap keepers, get extra cards, replace goals and discard things, all at once, it just doesn't feel like the player's turn is well defined anymore. One of the tricky rule shi...

We tested out the Mah Jongg Card Game we got at the toy shop in Julian last weekend. Like always, I will read through the rule book once or twice before actually trying to explain rules to Anne.  This one has several layers of complexity, but the basic game is just an extended version of Rummy.  There are all the suits and objects you would expect to find on Mah Jongg tiles, but with English captions for some of them, like the flowers and seasons. Basically, for the two player game, you deal 13 cards to each player and the dealer turns up a card on the discard pile.  That's not exactly what the rules say, but it has the equivalent result.  Technically, we're supposed to pass a card to the player on our left before the first draw.  Details, details. From there, the goal is to go out by getting three four-of-a-kinds and a pair then announcing "Mah Jongg!" and laying them down.  There are only a few other rules in the base game.  If you can use the top di...

Minecraft Explorers was a fun find at Walmart.  We almost never go there, but our George Foreman Grill broke and after some mean not-so-lean ground turkey spit grease all over Anne, we had to go find a new one.  While we were there, we found the game.   I trust titles by Ravensberger though they do tend to have a step more complexity than we prefer.  When I looked it over at home, I wasn't expected the huge two-sided rule sheet.  That sheet was printed separately in 6 languages so we chuckled the ones that were not EN.  The cards had so many icons and numbers I worried that Anne would just be annoyed by it . I ended up watching a solo walk-through which helped make sense of that double-sided page of rules.  I was able to explain it and we got through the games. I'm not sure how useful a brief explanation will be.   Watch the video.  Overall, the layout has a row of chest cards,  a row for monster cards, two rows for biome card...

This is a deck of round cards with categories on one side and colored letters on the other side, plus an hourglass.  We don't like speed games or timed challenges, so it was nice to see that the tiny rule book had 10 different games described.  Unfortunately, they all seemed dull. In various scenarios, the game involves looking at the color of the letter on one card -- let' say you got a black E -- then look at the black category -- maybe it's "Sports Stars" -- on another card.  Whoever comes up with a name or word starting with that letter in that category gets a card or a point. Not our cup of tea.  We never even took out the hourglass. One of the games just used the letters to make a 4 letter word and swap one letter per turn making new words until you get stuck. Also not our cup of tea. I don't mind spending a buck or two to see game ideas.  If we had bought it new it would probably be about $15 these days, and that would have been disappointing. I see how...

Anne wanted tots.  Tater tots.  Where was that place on Grand that had those yummy tots?  Of course all of Grand was under heavy construction so we had to park blocks away and walk.   It was Burger Bench.  Anne took Dory and sat down while I stood in line to order.   A guy came in and urgently started saying hello. After about 20 seconds I realized it was Chris Legg, long time gamer friend (2nd generation in fact).  Really long time.  We first met him back in 1990 when their parents were playing D&D and other games at Doug's house. We had not seen him in about 2 years.  They were eating at the restaurant right next door when Carol had seen us walking by.  A truly random tot encounter. Nice to see them again.  We got a bit caught up they said we could come over for some games after 4.  We were planning to go home and play some board games anyway, so that was perfect. We ended up playing Modern Problems ...

Another theme we like to try are space-based games.  Stellarion looked good and when you first open the box the presentation is excellent. There are 8 little decks of cards.   Each card has a Type and a Galaxy.  Each Type and Galaxy has its own deck.  Each Type deck has two of each Galaxy of that Type, and each Galaxy deck has two of each Type for that Galaxy.  Even though you know exactly what is in each deck,  bringing the right cards to the top to turn in matching sets is surprisingly difficult. Each round you can either trade in a matching pair of cards (same Type) to mess with the decks or trade in a set of the four different Types for a Galaxy to launch a ship.   Eight launches wins the game. I ended up having to write up a little cheat sheet about what rack pair of cards can do.  The publisher really should have printed some cards for that, since it's a drag to have to keep the rulebook open the whole time. Of course, i...

"Space Puppies": They sold us on the cute box and title.  Our collection is heavily geared toward games with cats and dogs.  And space.  So yeah, Space Puppies.  The game comes with a nice mat to put the draw pile, discard pile and planet cards on.  You start with 5 cards, and then the rules tell you ... pretty much nothing.  One spot says you "play one or two cards" in your turn, the other spot says you "take one or two of the moves listed here."  The tiny rule sheet says nothing about whether you play cards face up in front of you for any reason.  It actually says to study the cards to learn what they do.  Really? Here are the rules cards, which are not that helpful.  We figured there would be a website on the box with a helpful video -- that is almost the standard these days.  But the site was non-existent. What does "add dogs to your collection mean?" You can "play action cards on an opponent" but some cards must obviously be pl...

I do like simple games when they come up, but they really do need to involve some kind of decision at least once in a while.  This one is just a deck of cards with nuts and squirrels.  On your turn you can keep drawing cards, as long as they are nuts.  You can stop and keep the ones you've got, or keep going.  But if a squirrel comes up, you lose all the nuts you gathered that round. That's it.  Just a version of Greed that you could play with regular dice, but here you have a few cute graphics. It might be good for really young kids.  It's mildly funny at first, but soon leads to, "That's it?" So, this will go in our donation box for the Boys & Girls club.   Along similar lines, Go Shark Go was just a Go Fish deck with different graphics, and Eats-a-Lotl looked cute but all you do is flip cards up and if you see a match, the first one to yell out the silly catch word gets the match.  No number, no points, not our kind of game.  I re...

This one feels a bit like Cat Lady, but without the distraction of toys and costumes. There is a deck of Animals and a deck of Help cards (health, hearts, food), also a deck of Location cards oriented horizontally.  The animal deck is interesting because one side has the sad version of the animal oriented vertically, where the other side shows the happy animal horizontally. The setup is just the sad-side-up deck of animals with two showing to the right of the deck, then the face-down deck of Help cards with three face up cards next to it.  Then the Location deck with three face-up cards. The basic idea is that you can draw two cards each turn, any face-up card.  Some animals give you a bonus card, so if it has a plus sign you get a free card with a plus sign if there are any showing. The overall flow involves grabbing sad animals, then getting Help cards to care for them.  If you have the resources the animal needs, discard those and flip the animal to the happy side...

This was another card game that had been sitting around for a few weeks.  The setup is simple: each player is dealt 9 cards, then each player makes a 3x3 grid of face-down cards and flips any two of them face up after that.  Between the players is the draw pile and discard pile.  The point is to get the lowest score at the end.  That's it.  The cards range from 0 to 10, with a few multicolored -5 cards thrown in. The card dynamics of this game are really interesting.  You can draw a card from the draw pile or the top discard.  Then either replace one of your cards (face up or face down) with the new card (face up), or if you pulled from the draw pile you can choose to discard the card and peek at one of your face down cards instead.  So there is a bit of a memory game going on. There are black "action cards" which let you peek at any card from any player, or swap any two of your cards, or swap any card of yours with an opponent card of your choice...

We wanted to spend some time outside under our gazebo, so I grabbed some small games we had not tried before.  The first was Skip Bo Junior.  It looked like a goofy kids game, and those can be a lot of fun.  We have never played Skip Bo (Senior), so we knew nothing about this version. The Junior version is just a matter of making sequential stacks of 1 to 10 and trying to get rid of your cards.  The art is a bunch of funny and cheerful bugs numbered 1 to 10 with a ? (wild card).  You start with a stack of 10 cards face down -- this is your stockpile.  Flip the top card face up.  At first you have to picture three face-up cards next to your stockpile and four playable spots in the middle of the table where you build stacks. The game play was smooth and easy to learn, and a lot of actual fun.  More fun then I expected from looking at the box and thinking, "Oh, another game where you stack cards from one to whatever." Each round, you are dealt three ...

We brought Cat Lady back over from my place and it was more fun that we had remembered.  Sure, there are a bunch of different scoring options to keep in mind: feeding the cats, the catnip, the costumes, who has the most different types of toys and such. The overall flow of taking a row or column of 3 cards, and then having the cat token say which row or column is not available all went very smoothly.  The Spray Bottle card lets you move thte cat token to another row or column when you really want those cards that are blocked. I put together a handy little score sheet to help wrap up those final numbers. You can download the PDF here. Since all the food and lost cat cards end up on the discard pile as you trade them for food tokens and Stray Cats, you have to shuffle well or you will get a grid of just food.  Sometimes there are too many cats and not enough food, other times no cats show up for the first five or six turns. I suppose you could really study the available car...

We found this one at a thrift shop in Ramona for $4.99, and I remember telling Anne, "I heard this one was cool."  She gave me one of those "you always say that" looks, but I really did want to see what was in this particular box.  It took a while to get to it with all the projects we have going on. Quick note: it's not technically a "game".  The box clearly says it's a puzzle for one player.  But if it was just me trying to figure it out, I would probably have given up after the first half hour.  This will always be a better experience with another person helping to find the clues. When you first open the box, it is underwhelming.  It looks like a deck of about 200 cards, a pen and a notepad.  You follow the instructions on the cards in order, and one of the first odd things you are asked to do is to put a special card in the freezer.  Sure, why not?  I figure some kind of message will appear.  Anyway, you sort through some basic trivia...

We have seen this game a few times, and it looked cute.  We finally got a copy a few weeks back, finally got a chance to try it out today and, well ... it was confusing and weird, and not in the good way where we feel we're going to discover something we like.  We really wanted to like it, so we pushed through whatever the rulebook was trying to say. The rules really need a better section on how to identify the different types of cards, it just starts by saying to sort that big stack of cards you've never seen before into a deck for each dragon character card, a deck for each season, and a market deck. It turns out that the seasonal cards have colors behind the top half, and the market deck starts packed with the cards with a little "st" in the lower right (the "starter cards"), and the dragon cards all match the names at bottom center.  But a few cards have no markings, and we just threw them in the market deck.   Yes, there is a detailed Card Glossary page...

Anne showed me a new card game this weekend.  It was called "Tick", and was something she played with her usual canasta group when less than four players showed up.  The basic idea was: use two decks of cards, then play hands or 3 cards with 3s wild, 4 cards with 4s wild, up to 13 cards with Kings wild, then back down from K to 3 again.  Cards count as face value (2 to 13) with Aces being 21.  If you manage to go out, you score -25, otherwise, lay off what you can and score the rest as positive points.  Lowest score wins. To go out, you need to play straight flushes or X-of-a-kind, with the wildcards and jokers.  It's a long, drawn-out kind of rummy, but it's interesting how some card counts are harder to get rid of.  Getting rid of the hands of 5 and 8 are tough, since you need runs of 4 or 5, with one card left to discard.  With 13 cards, you usually have 2 or 3 wilds.  When one player goes out, the other players have one more turn to clear...

Here's a card game we picked up on our last game/thrifting trip: Moose in the House.  I almost got this from the Gamewright website after finding another game of theirs that we really enjoyed about a year ago.  They have the rules PDFs for all their games, so you can get a feel for them.  That's a good idea.  I almost bought a few. The art is cute, worth some chuckles the first time you see them.  The rules have some funny gags in them, ending with facts about moose.  It plays out in a very simple way.  Each player gets 4 cards to start, and each player has a "house" in front of them, a space where cards are played.  You build houses by playing empty room cards in from of the other players.  You don't build your own house at all.  Each house can have a maximum of 3 empty room cards. To kick off the fun, when you get a Moose in the House card (the one with the moose walking through the front door), you play it on an opponent, after which ...