ScottVee Gaming

Here is an odd diversion ... due to home repair work, we ended up at a laundromat downtown.  After the previous trip involved heat, restless legs and some digestive trouble, I lost sleep the night before trying to figure out how to make this trip more sufferable. So made a "surprise" stop at Barnes & Noble on the way, to pick up two books of puzzles. These books have always been a reliable way to while away an hour or two, full of odd puzzles and activities.  However, they also tend to boldly include "Games" in their titles or splash pages even though none of the activities really qualify as games.  But it made me wonder about the dividing line.  Considering the variety of solitaire print-and-play games I have tried, is there really a big difference between a one-player game and a good puzzle? I had seen Games magazine over the years, of course, going back to the 80s.  Hard to imagine not knowing about it, as a lifelong games hobbyist.  But when I think...

 I got a few games in the past week.  Some have been written up already, but here is the batch: Cat Lady is yet another card game with cute cats everywhere.  This one is a bit more involved than Scram.  You work from a 3x3 grid of face-up cards, where each turn, each player can take a whole row or column, then move the cat token to block a whole row or column from the next player's turn.   You can get cat cards or food cards.  The food cards get traded in for food cubes, which go towards feeding those cats.  There are also cat toys, catnip and cat costumes, which score at the end of the turn.  And there are Lost Cat cards: you can trade two Lost Cats in for 2 VP (victory points) or one stray cat.  Each stray cat has a special power like "get 2 VP for each black cat you feed".  Here we are, halfway through a hand. The main 3x3 grid is in the middle, stray cats below them.  My cat cards are on the left, Ann's are on the right....

It was Anne's birthday, and we were out in the back patio of a relative, when one of her cousins out of the blue picked up the deck of cards that was sitting there and asked, "Have you ever played Nine Cards Down?" Oddly, no.  In my nearly 50 years of gaming and collecting rules of games and game history notes, I had never heard of that one.  I know that each family has a serious card player or two with a favorite game, but the list of common games is really quite small.  We play 500 Rummy and Gin Rummy, and Anne used to play Canasta with some friends.  I have seen some cribbage boards sitting on tables or counters in several houses in the pandemic year.  Then there are Hearts and Spades.  And Solitaire, but again, almost everyone plays the Klondike style even though there are a few dozen others available.  Let's just skip Poker, just no.  And that's just about it for household card games.  Nevermind all the apps.  I mean real cards. Her...

I had Outdoor Survival on my game shelf since the 80's at least.  A few years ago, I gave my board game collection to a family who was having actual board game nights.  At the time I had no players at all willing to come over and game, so it felt like a good move.  Now I wish I had half of those games back.  Not all of them, because THAT would be mental.  But some of them were classics, like Outdoor Survival. It's a famous game board, which is described as "13,200 acres of the great outdoors".  A three-part heavy folding board, and yes, the little plastic clips that are loose in the box are meant to hold the parts of the board together. The rules start you with a basic game, where you start at the base (number 5) in the middle of the board, and the first player to make it off the East or West edge of the board wins.  Here I am a few moves into a solitaire game. The basic rules are simple: roll a die to see your movement options.  Move.  Repea...

I discovered the "Blizzard of 77 Travel Game" through eBay searches for other games.  I don't remember what I was looking for, but it came up as a suggestion and looked like a lot of fun.  Having grown up in upstate New York myself, we lived through some crazy snowstorms as a kid, before the family moved to Long Island, so it was a fun topic.  I was able to reconstruct the board in my notebook of game design history, but there's no substitute for getting the real thing.  What you can't easily reconstruct from images or other people's game stories are the decks of event cards.  Not to mention the feel of the nice thick game board.  So, I found a near-mint copy listed for about $30.  With shipping, it was about the cost of a mid-range new board game. You start out on the Sunny Side of the board.  The goal is to get to all five locations and collect a card from each one, then get home for the win.  So here we are on the Sunny Side... When you la...

The last few weeks I have been in and out of a series of friday night D&D sessions.  The group has been gaming together for 30 years, and technically, our extended group goes down to the grandchildren of some of the original players.  Lifelong GM Doug was running a campaign near the city of Cordegast on his Bead world which has been in the works for decades, and we started off at first level.  I am a big fan of the original few versions and the simplicity of it all, so here was my chance to see how weird and colorful the 5e rules really were.  So ... I am a satyr artificer named Narvik.  It's fun being a starting adventurer who is still afraid of everything.  I am running my guy as a drama queen with chaotic principles, who also wants to look fabulous.  I seek out treasures and new flavors, then buy flashy things and get tired of all that material stuff so easily.  My mixed bag of abilities may not turn out to be useful, and with a Wisdom of 8...

I was bored late at night and was browsing through some Facebook board game seller group, listings of the same common stuff over and over.  Then someone was offering a like-new copy of the 1979 game of CAREERS for a few bucks plus shipping.  It got here yesterday, and not only was it somehow crisp and new, but it was way more fun than I remembered. Now, I had found screen shots of 4 or 5 different editions of this classic game online, but the tiny text in the career boxes made them unusable and print-and-play test runs.  With each new edition, the career paths changed, each fitting their decade.  It is a fascinating history. Sometimes when people say they remember the game of LIFE, ask them if they remember the little cars with the people pegs, or the spinner popping off and wiping all the cars off the board ... if they don't remember that, I suspect they were actually remembering CAREERS instead.  The two games occupy a very similar niche, but in different ways...