ScottVee Gaming

Utopia Engine is a big, solitaire print-and-play game available at PnPArcade It is an impressive creation, with all the care that obviously went into it, and it has a big story about an artificer trying to rebuild a fabled machine to prevent Doomsday.  We were in the middle of the pandemic and I heard about it from one of many Youtubers who were talking about solo games -- that's how I discovered PnPArcade and Utopia Engine.  I played the two-page black and white version, though there is also a compact one-page version and a gorgeous full color PDF as well.  Check out its BoardGameGeek page for a look at these other layouts. At first, it was fun rolling the dice and following along in the rules to figure out which boxes to put the scores in, and how they add up to success or failure of each task.  By the end of the first page, I was finding some possible grey areas, just not sure if a certain combo could be scored or not, and I more or less just drifted off to other...

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...

I was going through my shelf of old RPG books recently and found my original copy of Starbase Jeff tucked away on a shelf.  This was one of the low-cost classic games created by CheapAss Games back in the 1990s.  It came in a paper sleeve and had just the instructions and space station tiles you would need to play.  The designer knew that we already had heaps of dice and tokens and pawns to use, so he only printed the unique items.  They were always twisted, quirky and fun.  Yup, James Ernest, someone I really admired as a game creator.  Blast from the past. I had an urge to Google him and see where his creative mind ended up.  Not only is he still around, but there is still a website for CheapAss Games , and he put about 20 of their old games on their website as free print-and-play versions. It was fun to see them again, including ones I had never seen back then, and ones I had never heard about.  And of course, Kill Doctor Lucky, which works fin...