ScottVee Gaming

This is a pretty simple Tetris-type puzzle where you have a series of rows that are 8 blocks wide, filled with cats that are 1, 2, 3 or 4 blocks wide.  You try to complete rows to make them go away, and a new row rises from the bottom.  I have seen the same game using cars and other themes, which did not interest me at all, but somehow, the same thing using cartoon cats and an occasional meow and I find it hard to put down. The darn thing runs an ad after every game, and sometimes even before your first game of the night, so boo for that.  And they want $8.99 to hide ads, when I'm willing to pay maybe $3-5 which seems fair.  There are some cute characters and bonus actions, and some kind of storybook that I almost never look at. As for strategy, it has just enough to think about.  It comes down to how many open spaces are on each line.  It there is only one open block, you won't be able to fill it if all the blocks above it are more than one block wide....

We haven't been playing a lot of tabletop games lately, since Anne got into Minecraft and we're having fun building a new world together.  Last one we tried was Random Fun Generator, and oddball item I saw at Barnes & Noble, but since it had Steve Jackson Games on the box I figured it would be something fun.  Turns out it's a book of 21 new dice games, and comes with 20 new 6-sided dice.  It looked like a collection of clever dice diversions, each very clearly spelled out with long examples of game play. Since most of them need a pencil and score sheet, we chose Malpractice to play with.  This was a self-scoring game, no numbers needed.  Each player starts with two patient dice (both start as 3s) and three dice that get rolled to try and help the patients.  If you can pair a rolled die with a patient die, increase the patient die by one pip.  If you roll a pair you can choose a patient and increse them by one.  No patient can be altered twice ...

I finished Wish Stone, another nonogram game from the makers of Two Eyes.  The story was an annoying thing about a flying whale island and a magical rock and a princess, but I like the feel of completing the puzzles one line at a time, so the story doesn't matter to me.  I was susprised that after finishing the last of the puzzles in the story level there was only a quick graphic saying I had completed the game, too quick to even get a screenshot of, and now my only option is to replay levels I have already finished.  At least give players some little bonus thing to look at after so many hours of puzzles. Another nongram game from the same devloper is Picross Survival,  This one has a completely different look and feel.  You are an explorer who gets to follow stepping stones on various maps -- there is a 10x10 world, a 15x15 world and a 20x20 world (Antartica).  I don't really like the smaller puzzles, so I'm in the frozen wastes.  After the 9 levels o...

This is part two of my series about Idle Heroes.  I wanted to start by giving a shout out to Barry Gaming for his upbeat, friendly and complete series of videos about the game.  Here is one of his episodes full of tips for early in the game .  (He is not endorsing this post, in fact he doesn't know I exist.  I just found his videos worth sharing.) I wanted to start with a good login checklist ... When you login, always look for the Check-In icon at upper left, right next to your player avatar.  Oh look, I made it to level 88.  Anyway, click Check-In for daily bonuses.  Right after that is an icon that has a new offer every 8 hours, click that one too.  Right after that is the gold coin bar.  Click that next to see if you have a free Hand of Midas offer to click on.  Then click the Campaign and get your loot and click the green Get button for coins and essences. If you have a Celestial Island, get the output from all your resource mines....

I was looking for old apps on my tablet that I could delete to make room to test new things, and saw the old icon for Idle Heroes.  I played that about 2 years ago and have tapped on it a few times since then.  It's actually a gorgeous game just chock full of activities, screen after screen of things to do. Here is the home page where you access all the different areas and stages of the game: At its core, it's another game where you build a team of heroes that can level up and get new equipment, and of course the equipment can also level up.  Initially, you click the Campaign island and your heroes fight their way through the levels, unlocking major features on the home world page as you go.  I didn't write them all down, but right now I have to unlock Campaign stage 13-8 to unlock the Auction House.  These are well spaced out so there is always something to work towards and look forward to. Here is my page of heroes: And here's my top hero, showing the stats sc...

I ended up at a Dave & Busters arcade yesterday for my brother's 51st birthday, along with his son who is about 8.  Considering it's a huge room full of gaming machines, I expected to have a lot to say from a game perspective.  Sure, there were big machines with short versions of Frogger, Monopoly, Crossy Road, Wheel of Fortune, machines branded with Star Trek, Ghostbusters, various zombie franchises, games where you can fish, bowl, shoot hoops for points ... a huge variety.  But it was a sensory overload and I can't think of a useful way to discuss any of it.  I suppose for the few games we spent more than a minute playing, there were these: There was a 6-player jumbo Pac-Man table with some strange add-ons to the original.  This was a lot of fun.  You can try to eat the dots or just chase each other around and get ghosted when you're not paying attention.  Trouble is, the games were not designed for long play times.  They tease f...

I am interested not just in board games, but also the makers of board games.  You never know what will be in these little boxes.  For Cover You Assets, there was a leaflet talking about the mom-an-pop game company and their family.  Check out Grandpa Beck's Games for more about them, their games, and their fun videos.  Looks like a fun bunch. Cover Your Assets is a fairly simple card-matching game.  It is meant for 3-6 players but has a big 2-player variation starting on page 12 that works very nicely.  So that is what I will describe here. The cards represent various assets with prices, like Comic Books, Jewels, a Piggy Bank, and so on.  There are also gold and silver cards which act as wild cards and have the highest card values ($50K and $25K).  In the 2-player game each player gets a hand of 6 cards and there are 3 stacks of 10 dealt out with top card showing (the Draft Piles). Now, each turn you can either (1) make a set from your hand, (2) ...