ScottVee Gaming

We picked up a few games at Barnes & Noble today.  I went in there specifically to get the latest Scrabble Dictionary, because I have another blog where I specifically talk about word and word games, and sequences of words, and I wanted an easy way to note which words were Scrabble words, without having to type every word into a darn web search. Will Shortz is a puzzle legend, and his website and amazing profile can be found here . I remember way back when he was the editor of Games magazine, but his credits are as much fun to read as any set of game rules.  I wish I had accomplished one tenth of what he did in the realm of gaming. I grabbed this game because it sounded very simple, and it was as simple as it sounded.  Basically, as a two player game, each player draws 15 letter tiles from the box, and someone rolls the four big chunky dice.  The dice combos give the rules, and it's a race to see who can build the first two-word crossword solution to the rules sh...

Here is something that popped into my head randomly while trying to sleep last night ... Back in the late 90's, I was in my one and only Scrabble tournament.  It was a local fundraiser at the Escondido Public Library.  My wife-at-the-time was on my team, and two close friends were a couple on another team.  There were about 30 players, and our entry fees went to a literacy charity. I won a few rounds, and as I recall I made it to the round where there were only 2 games being played.  So if there were 32 players to start, round two would be 16, round three would be 8, round four would be those two games.  That all adds up (in my head). My fresh opponent started by saying, "Let's not add up the scores each round, so we can focus on the game.  It's such a hassle." I didn't know if there was an actual rule against doing that, but I figured I could ignore the total score.  Why should those numbers affect my choice of words anyway? In the end, we did add our...

I got a bit tired of the word unscramble games I had been poking at in between other things lately.  A while back I switched to Zen Word, which is very similar to the others (Word Collect and Word Trip), but it just has a more relaxing vibe.  Some app was also installing games when I never asked for them.   Zen Word boots up with a little uplifting quote, and has short 3-line poems for each new "location".  The poems are not very good ... they have a good choice of words but only a few had a decent rhythm.  It's so easy to just start writing words and forget to read them aloud to see how they sound.  If you can stick to the same number of syllables or accents per line, the result can just flow off the tongue rather than getting stuck in a bunch of extra sounds.  Others felt like they had translation issues.  But it was a nice feature, again going with the relaxing vibe. The dictionary in Zen Word is better than the other two games. ...

Of the games in that 8-pack we got this weekend, it looks like the original owner just took out the Uno deck and donated the rest so we could get them.  The pack also included Uno Flip, which I wanted to take a look at.  I always felt that Uno could use some expansions, but since it's most entertaining cards -- the Reverse -- is useless in two player games, and we almost never have more players, we rarely play. What's the twist in Uno Flip?  There's a Flip card, and one side of the deck is colored differently.  So, when you play the Flip card, you flip the deck and everyone flips their hands.  That sounds fun, but the only difference on the "dark side" is that the Draw One card is now a Draw Five card.  Really?  That's the only thing they could think of?  Okay, they also changed the Skip card to a Skip Everyone cards, but that would play the same either way in a two-player game. Mad Gab was interesting in a surprising way.  And after reading ...

Word Collect had a minor UI update that cleaned up the graphics of a few panels.   You can now tap to skip the annoying wait between levels while a little meter slowly updated from level X to X+1.  Like you could ever be on a fractional level like 1201.3.  Just go from 1201 to 1202, done.  You can now tap the extra words on a level to scroll through all those definitions, which is neat, because it used to just accept an odd word and there was no way to ask it why it thought it was a word.  Of course, they come back with "Word Not Found" for most of those odd words anyway, and they added a bug that broke the word wrap on that long list of extra words fails, so the list just zooms off the screen, so you can't see most of them at all. 7/21 update: Oddly, after mentioning the little update of Word Collect where we can now view definitions for all the Extra Words but the word wrap was broken, yesterday afternoon it went back to the old layout: word wrap...

Word Collect is a good word unscrambling app which brags on the splash screen that it has "over 2000+ levels".  Which is comically redundant.  But yeah, over the past year we have reached over 1000 levels on various devices.  Somehow it sees my phone and tablet as two different users, so I can be on the same league and compete with my other self.  A lot of other word unscrambling apps have been showing up as ads on other apps, but all of those Word Cookie and Word Forest and Word Whatever apps felt more juvenile than this one.  I don't need smiling ducks or photos of the pyramids to find the words any faster.  Few things are bigger turn-offs for me than a game that tells you everything to click on and never stops nagging.  This app assumes you came here to do these word puzzles and just lets you do them. The one big UI issue is that while connecting the circles containing letters you may sometimes hit the edges of other circles and screw up the word, s...

While staring at our shelf of games, I saw an unopened one that I had no memory of buying, which had apparently been sitting around for years.  It was Quiddler, a word game by Set games .  After which there was another one from the same company called Five Crowns, that we also took for a spin. Quiddler was a solid word-building game with art inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts.  Both games had almost the same exact rules: start with 3 cards in the first hand, 4 cards in the next, up to a final round of 10 cards; after one player melds all their cards and discards on to go out, all other players get one last turn to do their best.  For Quiddler, it just flowed very simply.  Make words, go out.  Here's a typical hand early on: I got some help from an impartial third party for most of that game ... A bit later on, as the hands got bigger, I was seriously wondering if I could bluff a way to make QUANKERER sound like a real word, only to decide that if ...

We did a test drive of a new card/word game this weekend, this time it was WordSpiel.  The basic idea is that you have to play a word using the last one, two or three letters of the last word played.  It started off easily: The rules show the words building into a perfect spiral around the draw pile, but, well, that's never going to happen.  What a pain... The first thing we decided was to reset the spread of played cards when it started to get too ragged.  Really, the game is so simple, there is no grand strategy, so we don't need to know every card that was ever played. There, nice and tidy.  Goodbye, impossibly neat spiral.  Anyway, it was an enjoyable way to burn through some cards on a sunday afternoon and make sometimes funny combinations of words.  The only other rule of note is that if you get stuck without a word you can trade in up to three cards as your turn, or flip the top card from the draw pile after you first say whether you are going t...

I found a 1954 blue box version of the card game Bali in my collection of card decks.  Yes, if you put stuff away in the closet for years, seeing them again can be like going to the store.  Anyway, I remember trying it once before and being unimpressed, but this time we took some time to read the rules more closely and tinker a bit.  The tiny rulebooks from that era were full of ambiguous phrases, and just don't match the precision of modern rule sets now that decades of "rules lawyers" have hashed them out over gaming tables. It turns out to be a solid game.  Let's focus on the two player game, since we are a two player gaming group.  You get 7 columns of cards, like in standard solitaire.  Each column is called a "panel", so each player has 7 panels where they will be building words or parts of words vertically downward. The first few runs we tried it with just 5 panels, since it felt like 7 was too many. So, each turn you can add onto any ONE of your pan...