ScottVee Gaming

Chickapig looked cute when I bought it, but it sat on the shelf for a while because it also looked a bit dopey.  So, when we finally sat down to play we figured what the heck, it could be fun.  And fun it was. It's an abstract game where you try to get your little animals across the board.  There are chickapigs, hay bales, and a cow that poops when it moves.  Haybales can only move one space orthagonally, but your chickapigs can move in a straight line until they hit an obstacle.  They cannot stop halfway.  You roll a die to see how many moved you get, and you can choose any combination of pieces to move ... so you can smack into another piece then change direction, shoot all the way across the board and bonk into something else. If you roll a one, you have to move the cow instead.  In this case, you can move it to any other space, but it leaves a poop behind.  If you roll a two, you can either make two moves or take a card you can use now or late...

Many years ago, I would meet up with Robert A. Kraus (RAKgraphics) each year when he came to town to setup his both at ComicCon.  We were always bouncing ideas around.   He had a series of mini games called Coin Creatures, where you use coins as your game pieces and his endless cute Creatures were all over the board. We put together a few full page games for that series.   Here is one called Reapers Challenge,  which guest starred Bob's famous Chakan character who was long ago featured in a Sega video game . For each of these projects we wanted to give as much play for the price as we could,  so we included another whole game board on the backside,  and some alternate rules.   As long as all the rules fit on one sheet of paper. This one is simple: move your pieces along the thick lines but capture by following the arrows.  The only other rules are: you can move any combination of pieces a total of seven spaces; you can't...

Here is a game we got a few weeks back at the thrift shop in Ramona.  Blokus gives you a big grid and each player gets a bag of tetris-shaped pieces.  You take turns putting pieces on the board, starting in the corner squares and only connecting to your existing pieces at the corners.  At first it felt like a simple game where you get as much territory as you can and block the other player in.  But a solid line of your pieces won't stop to other player if there's a corner they can expand on.  So it gets really interesting. With two players, I can't see any way we would not both get all our pieces down.  But there are a few rule variants on the little instruction sheet.  One said for one player to play blue and red and the other to play green and yellow, and we played them in alphabetical order.  That gave a much better feel for the game, and one by one the players got stuck.  When the last player is unable to move, everyone gets minus one poi...