ScottVee Gaming

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...

Minecraft was celebrating its 15th anniversary this month, and made it a lot of fun.  There was a bit of a scavenger hunt across Tiktok and Discord to get some capes, and one free piece of character bling per day.  Those is not really my thing, but I am now wearing an axolotl cap on my head and some weird nether leggings.  This was a big showcase event for Bedrock edition, as most of these items wont work in Java until some future update, if ever. The key item for me was their 15th Celebration map, which was a massive piece of eye candy at first, with hundreds of custom blocks and custom paintings I wish we could get for our own builds.  (Then I realized they are probably available in Bedrock add-ons or will be soon.)  But after exploring, it just went on and on, with a delightful central cake room surrounded by tables where every major creature and character in the game had a carefully scripted cake-eating routine.  Some of those were comedy classic. ...

Rockhounding: Chemistry was a mod for Minecraft version 1.10.2 which had another solid set of chemical reactions to play with.  I hopped onto my VeeTech2 modpack world to refresh my memory (and notes) about it. Everything in this mod starts with the uninspected minerals found throughout the world.  You put these into the Mineral Sizer to get a huge range of minerals, but first you need some Lab Ovens to make some of the acids.  These all use composts which are made in the Lab Blender, so let's start there ... [Lab Blender] 3 S = 8 Sulfur-bearing compost (SComp), or coal blocks or coal coke blocks, there are variants for all of these that make different amounts [Lab Blender] 3 apatite = 4 fluorite-bearing compost (FComp) [Lab Blender] 3 salt = 4 NaCl compost (NaClComp) [Lab Blender] 3 coal = 4 Cracked Coal compost (CCComp) [Lab Blender] 3 Carbon dust = 2 Carbon compost (CComp) [Lab Oven] 1000mb H2O + SComp = 500mb H2SO4 [Lab Oven] 500mb H2SO4 + NaClComp = 300mb H...

The team at Mojang has put out some very elaborate April Fools snapshots in the past.  About 2 years back, they had that crazy update where you could throw written books into portals to generate new dimensions built from almost any block, so you could have a world of end ships floating over mountains of trapdoors.  That's still fun to revisit every now and then. This year they put out the "A or B" snapshot, jokingly called the Voting Update.  I suppose it's a spoof of their own annual vote events, where players get to vote for a biome or a mob to be developed.  Each time, we wonder, why not just put all 3 of those mobs in the game?  Seems like they would have the people power to do it. Anyway, in this snapshot, you are bugged every few minutes by a chat message saying some vote just started, then you hit the V key to open the vote window, which gives a few weird options.  Vote for one, done.  These options change just about everything in ...

Chemistry in Games: Nuclearcraft Nuclearcraft was a mod for Minecraft version 1.10.2 which had a pretty solid set of chemical reactions to play with.  I hopped onto my VeeTech2 modpack world to refresh my memory (and notes) about it. First there are the Nitrogen and Helium Collectors which just output 10mb of those gasses per tick from the air.  And with an infinite water source you could hook up to an Electrolyzer to get 475mb of H2, 50mb of Deuterium and 500mb of O2.  That's some funky water. The Isotope Separator has 18 pages of recipes of this sort: Th ingot or dust or grit = 2 Th-232 + 2 tp Th-232 (I use "tp" for "tiny pile", "tiny clump", etc) ... same for the oxide U ingot or dust or grit = 2 U-238 + 2 tp U-235 ... same for the oxide Yellorium ingot or dust = U-238 + tp U-235 Blutonium ingot or dust = Pu-242 + tp Pu-239 Boron ingot or dust = B-11 + 3 tp B-10 Lithium ingot or dust = Li-7 + 3 tp Li-6 The rest are used to recycle fuel pellet...

Anne & I popped back onto our Minecraft world after being away for about a month.  It was fun revisiting our old stomping grounds.  Most of the places we remembered right away but a few of them were almost unfamiliar.  While mining, Anne's illuminati pet gave her a cloud pet, so wow.  After jetpacking to so many clouds and never finding one, she finally had one to play with.  I had fun showing her the controls for flight mode.  We checked out our Peak Isle town from above and tp'd to the Twilight Forest to zoom around some more. Here is our Inventory Pets building in Peak Isle: Later, while trying to sleep, my brain kept playing walkthroughs of some of my other favorite MC worlds.  It's amazing how much information we can store, how I can bring back ghostly images of the buildings from over 100 digital towns.  I'm sure the details are not as accurate as they feel at the time, but it seems like I walked from my Cathedral base out to...

What can you say about Uno, except that you match the color or number on the card at the top of the discard pile and try to get rid of all your cards first?  Sure, there are a few others cards: Reverse does nothing with just two players, but Skip will skip the next player and +2 skips them and also makes them draw 2 cards.  There is a Wild that matches any color.  The Wild +4 matches and makes the next player draw 4 cards, but you can only play it if you have no valid match, otherwise the target player can challenge you and if they catch you bluffing you're the one who has to draw cards. We got a pack of Minecraft Uno cards at a $5-and-under shop called Five Below, and the cute characters made it a little more fun to play than the usual solid colors.   Rather than calling out numbers, we would call out Sheep, Wolf, Wolf, Creeper ... which was odd but hard to resist. The box itself was full of tiny text, mostly in Spanish, and lots of logos, that I wrote about in...