ScottVee Gaming

We picked up MLEM in Julian this week.  Yes, I am easily lured in by cats and nice artwork on the covers.  I think the selling point for me was seeing Reiner Knizia's name on the box.  He was the designer of Botswana and Butterfly Garden, two games that couldn't be more different if they tried.  What would he do with cats and rockets? When I looked in the box, eeek ... there were way too many little pieces to punch out.  Then I rolled out the big game board and worried it might be too long for our gaming table.  But we stopped worrying and watched a video or two.  Like this one on the BoardGameGeek channel .  They did such a good job explaining it that I could replace all the worry with, "That's all there is?" So ... over half of those cardboard pieces are just score tokens.  Another third are for advanced rules.  That leaves a big cardboard spaceship, 4 player cards with 8 astronaut tokens each, a little rocket to move on the board...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We found a copy of Doodle Dice at a thrift shop in Black Canyon City.  It looked like it would be a Yahtzee style game but with shapes instead of numbers,  and that was exactly right. There was a bit of a twist though.  The box we got only had five dice when there should be six.  This was not much of a problem though.  Just take out the purple cards, the only patterns that use all six dice.  The game played just fine with five. Some of the patterns on the cards are really cute.  The game is just a matter of rolling and rerolling dice and trying to match one of the face up cards.  First player to score one of each color of card wins. The rules had some gaps, from the feel of it.  They said you can't have more than one card of the same color in your "hand", but many hands go by before the color you need comes up and I can't see not scoring some other  cards until then.  Maybe the game should end when a player gets all 5 (supposed to b...

We wanted to check out a few more games this weekend, but I was down for most of Sunday with a nasty headache behind my eyeballs.  Probably the usual eye strain, but how do you rest your eyes when there are so many things to do?  So many things that need to be done ... I did recover enough after dinner to try a few games of My Shelfie with Anne.  Like usual, I read the rules once or twice in the days before playing, and look for online video playthroughs if it looks at all complex.  This one looked like a simple Yahtzee-style dice-matching game, and I was not wrong. Note: I saw at least one other completely different version of this game where you actually place tiles onto shelves.  The version we got is the dice version.  It had the quickest setup time we've seen in ages.  The box has just these things: 6 dice, 4 score cards, 4 dry-erase pens, and a tiny rulebook. Each turn, you roll the 6 dice and try to match up to the sets you can score.  You ...

Another thrift store find up in Riverside.  This was in that basket of bundled-up vintage games, and I already knew what it was going to be.  It's just the old kid's game of Greedy Dice or Piggy Dice, but somehow it got sold to Milton Bradley with a guy's name boldly on the package as if he had invented the idea. The one difference is that in the royalty free game we counted the ones as the bad rolls, here they made custom dice with pig icons where the ones should be.  Here's the game: roll 3 dice as many times as you want on your turn and score all those points, but if you roll a piggy you score zero and your turn is over.  If you roll two piggies, your score for the entire game is negated, you start over at zero points. First player to 100 wins.  We ran through a game, then Anne said we should just play to 200 instead of starting over, but that's a mixed decision because it means the stakes are higher: those two piggies can now cost you well over 100 points. T...

Continuing the tale of my previous post ... We had about 40 minutes before ball dropped on New Year's Eve, and the egg nog was actually some kind of throat-burning rocket fuel, so someone grabbing the little cylinder of Zombie Dice. This is such a quick and simple filler game, I'm surprised I don't have a copy at home.  Basically, you pick three dice and count the brains.  When the first player reaches 13 or more brains, everyone gets one last round to try and beat the highest score. But every game needs a balancing act of numbers and forces.  In this case, the dice also have shotgun blasts and footprints.  You can keep rolling, but if you get a third shotgun blast in a round, all points gained in that round are lost.  You reroll three dice each time, including any footprints from the previous roll.   So, if you had two footprints, you grab one new die from the can plus the two footprints already rolled, and those are the three dice you roll. The secon...

Roll Estate is a dice-rolling game by Chris Richaud which can be found a Print-and-Play over at PNPArcade for just $3.  There are some extra posts and ideas on BoardGameGeek , including a brief interview with the creator. It's a buffed-up Yahtzee game, which is fun because we all know Yahtzee, so you start with a foot forward, AND many of us would like to think of ways to expand Yahtzee or give it a more concrete meaning.  Well, Roll Estate frames the die rolls in terms of buying real estate and making investments. I have played it a few times in the black and white version, as shown.  The color PDF is quite vibrant,  and the graphics add a lot of character, but my old core printer was very slow and frank ink like crazy.  The sheet looks complicated, but there are the usual 1's to 6's and 3-of-a-kind and 4-of-a-kind at the top in the Real Estate section, with the other familiar rolls down below in the Investment section.  Up top, you essentially get to sco...

Here's a game that I played for a while about 2-3 years back, and when looking at it again to get screenshots, it has a distinct look and feel and is as enjoyable as I remembered.  Dice Hunter has you finding dice representing creatures from a range of mythologies.  Each die has a certain combination of sides, and a special power with a recharge cost.  Overall, the game has a solid design and friendly graphics. Here is what a die looks like in the detail view: And here is my set of six selected dice in action against a range of foes.  They drop down as you eliminate them, and falling will stun them for one round, which is a big part of the strategy. When your dice are charged, they glow.  The number at left of center is the number of "locks" you have left.  The dice show swords (attack), shields (defense), lightning bolts (energy) and stars (stars, I guess).  Each round you can lock some number of dice by clicking them, then swipe the rest to roll them...

In between real life things and some Mincraft sessions, and spending too much time on those little app games that keep asking for a dollar here or $2.99 there, we got some actual board game play into the mix.  First, I brought over Coral Islands, which turned to be 3 different games in one box: Coral, Islands (flip over the little game mat and use different cards), and a solo game I intend to try some day.  This is a dice-stacking game that comes with about 80 dice.  You make vertical stacks of up to 3 dice, one at a time, and try to match the patterns on the cards.  Match a pattern, take a card, and it sounded almost too simple to be worth the hassle of working through the specific setup situation.  But after there are a few dice on the mat, it's obvious that it's not as simple as it looked. First, a die can only be placed on a die of lower value (or an adjacent empty space), except for ones which can be placed on any number.  And you get fish tokens for n...

Yahtzee is certainly one of the most widely known classic dice games in the world.  I'm sure we have all spent many hours enjoying it.  Yet it is just one of a group of other games where you roll five dice and score some combination of them. The full history is covered pretty well on the Wikipedia page .  Yahtzee dates from the mid 1950s.  Before that, there was a well-known parlor game known as Yacht, with pretty much the same rules.  About the only things Yahtzee added were the top section bonus, three of a kind, and the small straight. I put together a table of the different rolls, names and scores among some of the better known games in the Yacht family. Pattern Yacht name Yacht score Yahtzee Name Yahtzee Score Generala Name Generala Score Yatzy Name Yatzy Score Cheerio Name Cheerio Score Hooligans Name Hooligans Score Ones Ones sum of the 1s Aces sum of the 1s Ones sum of the 1s Ones sum of the 1s One...

  Qwixx is a colored dice game from Gamewright, just six dice and a score pad. You can check it out here , even read the full rules.  Basically, there are two white dice and four colored dice, which match up with the four colored rows of numbers on the score cards.  The flow is that on each turn, the next player throws the dice.  All players get a chance to score the two white dice.  Then the player who rolled gets to score a combination of any white die and any one colored die.  So, everyone gets the white 2+4=6, then the active player can try to score an extra box of maybe white 6 plus blue 4 to get the blue 10.  The non-active players don't HAVE to score anything, but the rolling player must score one number on their turn or take a 5-point penalty box.  The genius of the colored scoring rows is that the top two rows go from 2 up to 12, and the bottom two rows go from 12 down to 2.  If they all went from 2 to 12, you would just alwa...