ScottVee Gaming

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...