ScottVee Gaming

At the Julian Toy Chest, there were a few games in a series of "1 player puzzle games."  I was able to pass up some of them, but how could I say no to Cats & Boxes with a cute cover like this? We don't normally do one player games, or games that are actually puzzles (not games).  But the very first things I blogged here was Cat Crimes, which, while it was supposed to be multiple players taking turns doing puzzles, we just played all the puzzles together.  And in this case, a fresh set of puzzle to play together sounded like fun. This one is very simple.  There is a 5x5 game board, 5 cats, and 4 irregular tiles with empty boxes attached.  The puzzle book has sixty puzzles ranging from simple to expert (like usual for these types of games).  Here, the feel of the puzzles is unlike anything we have played before. Follow the layout of the puzzle in the puzzle book -- just setup the board as shown.  Then you are given a minimum number of moves.  Ea...

I have posted a few times about playing Nonogram apps.  They are technically puzzles and not games, but check out these previous posts: this one from Nov 2020 , my post on completing Picross Survival , and my recent post about Nonogram Katana . Focusing on Nonogram Katana, they have over 100,000 puzzles submitted by users, suggesting that you can create your own puzzles.  About two years ago, I did one black & white puzzle with a pattern shaped like Florida, but since then we've been doing a lot more of the colored puzzles, so I thought it would be fun to try designing some of those.  The app is seamless when it comes to adding your own content: just go to My Nonograms, click + to add a new one, choose a size and color scheme, then you can use the palette to choose colors and use the controls you're already familiar with to fill out the pattern.  Here is a simple one of mine: It's just a basic spiral with four colors.  Once you save it, you can play it and s...

Anne is a big fan of sudoku puzzles.  She doesn't go through whole books of them like she did when we first met.  But we play a game once in a while.  I found this Sudoku Square game in Sedona, only to find out it really has nothing to do with sudoku at all, except for the name. Well, it looked like a cute puzzle anyway.  The idea is that each player gets a board and a set of pieces.  There are a bunch of dice with weird symbols.  Roll those dice and there's a setup phase that feels like Bingo: read off the letter and symbol on each die and put a stopper at that location. That's all the setup.  Now, just try to fit all those wooden pieces onto the board with the stoppers blocking those squares.  The rule book claims that there will ALWAYS be a solution, but I don't see how they guarantee that at all. Still, it took me about four minute to solve the first one, and Anne got hers, too.  For some reason, the second puzzle only took me about thirt...

I have always been amused by the games and activities attempted on the backs of cereal boxes.  I stumbled across one last week when putting a box of Honey Nut Cheerios back in the cupboard. It's nothing special, but it's not nothing.  There have been thousands of simple mazes on these boxes over the decades.  This one uses numbers to navigate the maze, which is still pretty easy for a grownup to do, but it gives the young eaters more credit than these products normally do.  I actually had a few pauses, as I eyeballed it and found the route.  Backtracking when you hit a dead-end is a step more difficult.  It's almost easier to just start over again and make note of the area to avoid. So, kudos to Cheerios for a less-trivial-than-usual breakfast distraction. I thought about cutting out the back of the box and actually placing pieces on it, and rolling a die to make more of a game out of it, but the box had already been recycled.  And just rolling dice wo...

We found this one at a thrift shop in Ramona for $4.99, and I remember telling Anne, "I heard this one was cool."  She gave me one of those "you always say that" looks, but I really did want to see what was in this particular box.  It took a while to get to it with all the projects we have going on. Quick note: it's not technically a "game".  The box clearly says it's a puzzle for one player.  But if it was just me trying to figure it out, I would probably have given up after the first half hour.  This will always be a better experience with another person helping to find the clues. When you first open the box, it is underwhelming.  It looks like a deck of about 200 cards, a pen and a notepad.  You follow the instructions on the cards in order, and one of the first odd things you are asked to do is to put a special card in the freezer.  Sure, why not?  I figure some kind of message will appear.  Anyway, you sort through some basic trivia...

Nonogram.com Nonogram Katana Two Eyes Nonogram   I actually never heard of "nonogram" puzzles until I ran into the Nonogram Adventure app in the Android Play store about six months ago.  The idea is to mark the boxes on the grid using the numbers around the edges.  Quite addictive, really.  So, after being a kid who played every little strategy puzzle I could find, and managing to go my whole life without falling into sudoku, I found myself hooked on this instead.  Sure. After working through a few hundred of those puzzles, I found other Nonogram apps, each with its own pros and cons.   Nonogram.com: a good basic apps, puzzles up to 15x15, black and white only.  They have a daily challenge, and about twice a month they put up a series of about 40-100 puzzles with two to seven days to score a trophy of some kind for solving them all.  You get three tries per puzzle, after which you have to "Buy More Lives" but they don't cost anything. Nonogr...

 CAT CRIMES was an unexpected surprise that we found in the kid section at Barnes & Noble.  It turned out not to be a head-to-head game but a series of logic puzzles to sort out with the cute little props provided. The rules say to take turns and read the clues to each other and keep track of who solved more cases, but it turned out we both had more fun solving the puzzles together.  The cards range from Beginner to Expert difficulty.  The clues get increasingly more cryptic as the difficulty goes up.  A beginner clue might be "Ginger is seated next to Tom Cat", while an expert clue might be "No cat with blue eyes is seated next to a claw mark" ... there are two cats with blue eyes, two claw marks ... but there always does end up being one solution that fits all the clues.  Flip the card and see if you figured out which cat did the deed.  The Expert ones are seriously tricky.   The fact that there are two seats at each side of the cat tab...