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...

The Great Races is one of the one-page games created by Sid Sackson, published in Games Magazine.  This one was in the Jan/Feb 1978 issue.  It's what we would now call a "roll and write" game, where you roll dice and make some kind of markings on paper or a score sheet. It's not complicated.  The score sheet represents a series of horse races.  You take turns rolling four dice and splitting them into two combos of two dice for scoring.  You mark off boxes in the 2 through 12 rows as needed.  First one to complete a row gets the higher point score shown next to that row.  At that time, if another player is past the double line, they get the second place (smaller) bonus.  That's it. It starts off as just roll and write, but once a race is finished, it's finished.  If race 4 is done, nobody gets to score a 4 anymore.  So toward the end there's some competition for the remaining numbers.  You can eyeball the scores along the way, and sh...