ScottVee Gaming

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...

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...

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...