ScottVee Gaming

Of the games in that 8-pack we got this weekend, three of them were so similar I will group them together for speed.  They are Blink, Bold, and Common Threads.  What's funny is that, if we had not also bought Set for the first time this weekend, it would not have been as obvious how similar these games are. I get it, big game companies want to offer a variety of games at various difficulty levels, and there have always been card games where you match various symbols in various patterns.  But these three just felt like slightly simpler versions of Set with either a different theme or one of the matching criteria removed for less brain drain. Blink has color, number and shape.  Bold has shape, size and pattern.  We haven't played those yet, they went into a box for some other day.  But we did play through Common Threads because it looked quirky Common Threads has a colorful cartoony character on every card.  You start by splitting the deck among all play...

Here is another game that is so simple it's complicated.  It's an interesting case story of a tiny set of rules that's just filled with holes.  It lead to a lot of incomplete moments. How simple is it?  There's a deck of big cards with detailed, cluttered (and VERY weird) drawings with lots of things in them.  You deal 5 cards to each player then somehow choose a starting word (rules gap).  We did this by truning over the next card, and the first person who says a words, that's the starter word.  Then, players just look at their cards and try to find a word for something in the picture that BEGINS with the LAST letter of the last word played. But here's what actually happened: too many words end in E, and we can't find any words for that, so I started just pointing out an eye and saying EYE, but then we were stuck with another E- word.  Technically, you can't repeat a word that has already been used, but we could have said EYEBALL the next time.  ...

I first heard about the card game Set about 20 years ago.  The cards looked so harmless but it had a certain word-of-mouth notoriety for being a brain teaser.  But why?  I finally bought a copy.  We already had Five Crowns and Quiddler from the same designer. It sounds so easy.  Find 3-card matches from the tableau of 12 cards.  Each card has four attributes: color, shape, number and texture.  A match is a set of 3 cards where each of the four attributes is either all the same or all different.  So, you could have three green cards (same color), solid fill (same texture), numbered 1 2 3 (different numbers), and three same/different shapes, that's a match. The game recommends using the small starter deck to get started, which does not have the texture element.  Once you see the logic of that, mix both decks together, deal out a new set of cards, and start losing your mind.  It really does get complicated.  About 90% of the first hour...