ScottVee Gaming

Do you ever get tired of card games that have the same boring set of rules from start to finish?  Yeah, that is so normal.  Snore.  In Fluxx, the goal is sooooo simple, just play two "Keepers" (green cards) that match the current Goal (the pink that is showing).  Out of a deck of about 90 cards, you would think that would be both simple and dull.   But in Fluxx, there are cards that modify the rules themselves.  So while it starts off as draw one card and play one card, the rules might change to draw three and play all, plus all kinds of weird bonus rules like trading in cards for other cards, allowing a second goal, limiting the hand size or how many keepers can be showing.  So, perfect name, Mr. Looney (actual name) ... the rules are always in flux. Here is a round of Fairy Tale Fluxx after just a few moves: the rules are Draw 4, Play 2, and the goal is the Princess and the Frog.  But wait, if you get the princess, the other player can yoin...

Probably the simplest modern game in my collection which is fun to replay any time is ... Tsuro.  It is a fine, lavish production on every level, a joy to unbox each time.  Open that red folder to refresh my brain that the rules really are as simple as I remembered.  Then flip through their gorgeous catalog, then peel back that lovely vellum sheet with the logo on it to get to the sturdy game board. "The Game of the Path", indeed.  Just deal three tiles and set up your piece at any mark around the edge of the board, then take turns placing tiles in front of your piece and moving all pieces to the ends of their paths.  The last one left on the board is the winner.  And that is essentially all there is to it.  I can't think of any useful strategy tips other than the obvious point of trying to stay away from other players and away from the edges of the board.  Still, a tile can set you on a path that takes you all the way across the board and off ...

  Wrapping up my series of gaming superlatives, we've come to the largest user base in gaming history and probably they biggest modder community as well.  And if those could somehow be argued, it has at least been, hands down, the best bang for the buck of my life.  Good ol', Minecraft.    It was about $20 back in 2007, still in beta, and 13 years later, they're working on 1.17. Here is my home page for my Minecraft ventures over the years.  I have played or tested nearly 1,000 mods over the years, and built and released a few modpacks of my own.  I was doing Minecraft videos (let's plays and tutorials) in the version 1.4 to 1.7 days; it was fun taking imaginary viewers on my expeditions with me, riffing comedy skits with the zombies, but ultimately YouTube got flooded with so many super-high resolution videos and live streams that my equipment just couldn't keep up. I have about 10 massive modded worlds now, which I cycle through, a few months playin...

No series of articles about my personal experiences with games would be complete without Dungeons & Dragons.  It would even fit into my series of smallest and oldest board games as probably the biggest game in history, by almost any measure.  Number of players times the number of books or number of pages?  Influence of the game?  Pick a measure, this game spans half a century now, with easily 100,000 pages of rule books and campaign settings and reference guides; it has the largest multiverse of any game or written series that I can think of, where every pantheon from human history can coexist in an eminently logical way; it has inspired more competing game systems and spin-offs than anything else I can think of.  It more-or-less created the modern RPG genre, evolving from a one book add-on for a table-top wargaming system - the leap that Gary Gygax made was "hey, what if we stop thinking about each piece representing an army, and think about individual char...

Here is a magical crafting card game with a unique prop: the market itself is made up of 6 little vials of colored powder on a sloped rack. The card trading is pretty simple, just a few basic actions to get, buy or swap to acquire the ingredients you need.  You can trade in ingredients for coins in sets of 2, 3 or 4, whichever number is on the cards.  Or you can trade ingredients for one of the potions that are showing.  The potions let you get more ingredients, or bonus coins, or even get paid a few coins to steal a card from another player.  The way the market works is that when you sell ingredients, you move the colored vial for that ingredient back up to the top, and the others roll down, sending their prices up.  Or there is a Supply Shift card with a blurb that's fun to read, which will cycle all vials until the selected color is at the lowest point on the slope, the highest price. I tried to work out a solitaire version after our first few test runs....

  One of my favorite basic card games as a kid was Mille Bornes, a simple car race simulation deck.  There are mileage cards (25, 50, 75, 100, 200), Stop and Go lights, Speed Limit cards, and then a fun combination of obstacles you can throw on your opponents to slow them down.  These are: Accident (negated by a Repair card), Out of Gas (cured by an Extra Gas card),  and a Flat Tire (fixed with a Spare Tire card).  There are also special immunity ("safety") cards, one for each obstacle. It's a simple game of throwing down mileage and trying to screw up the other players.  I always just draw a little race track, it's easier than trying to keep stacks of numbers sorted out; it's essentially a graphic display of our progress, and it's more fun to look at than a stack of numbers.  In the official rules, you are supposed to need a Go card to get started or after removing any obstacle, but we always drop that rule.  Life is just too short to wait for Go...

Death on the Cards (an obvious play on the "Death on the Nile" mystery by Agatha Christie) is a good game of trying to catch a murderer with a deck of cards.  Each player has a few Secret cards which they keep face down, and one player starts with the Secret that says they are the murderer.  Now, with just two players it's a bit anticlimactic since we always know who the killer is, but the card play is interesting enough to make up for this, and we can picture how it would play with more people. Anyway, the players all try to get the murderer to turn over the Secret card which exposes them, while the murderer tries to stay in the game until the last card is drawn because, cleverly, the very last card in the deck says Murderer Escapes.  There are some action cards to move cards from the deck to the discard pile (to get closer to the bottom) or from the discard pile back onto the deck (Delay the Murderer's Escape).  Otherwise, you mostly play sets of investigator cards...