ScottVee Gaming

A while back I heard about some new auction app and skimmed some listings and found these little wooden peg games. They made me think of the times I would be out on a road trip somewhere and stop at a little diner, and they would have games likes these.  Though the diners usually had variations of simple peg solitaire ("golf") and no dice to roll. These were all simple racing games, dressed up in sport themes.  Just roll dice and move.   They each came in plastic wrap with a red and a blue peg and two dice. The football one was playable.  The golf one was unplayable because there were more negatives than positives, especially -3 spaces for rolling a 7; but Anne did roll a two on her second roll and got a hole-in-one win.  For the next 10 minutes I don't think either of reached the halfway mark before getting sent back.  The derby game was just going around in circles, and we used an extra die each to track which lap we were on.  The rules for tenn...

We covered the 1979 edition of Careers early this year.  I wanted to see one of the older versions, figuring there would be some less politically correct squares.  So here is the 1965 edition.  Sure enough, there were some comically tasteless things to run into.  That space that says the director likes you now sounds creepy. The main difference is that the 1965 version has 8 career paths and 8 squares on each side of the board.  The newer version has 6 career paths and 7 squares per side.  The newer board removed Uranium Prospecting and Farming, and changed Sailing into Sports.  As for those other four squares on the board, they were the four squares we pretty much ignored: Auto Show (change cash into hearts), Statue in the Park ($ into Fame), Yacht Show (cash into hearts again) and an obnoxious space where "wife goes shopping" and spends d6x10% of all your cash on hand.  I don't recall in the newer game that the player with the medical degree ge...

I finally completed research for the debris field in Idle Planet Miner.  It only took about a full month of what little time I have to fiddle with it daily. Yes, the debris fields are automatically harvested, just like the asteroids.  I have seen two debris fields appear so far.  One gave me a satellite dish and the other gave 71 basic computers.  So they are pretty much exactly what I was expecting: a source of random items. Here is one I caught in a screenshot... I added the white box so you can see it better.  They are gone in about 5 seconds like the asteroids so you might not see them most of the time.  I suddenly have 60 advanced computers, 700 lasers and a ton of other things.  Now I need 5 more nuclear reactors and 92 scrith alloy for the only other research available: superior asteroid harvester, another x1.3 value bonus.  I guess I can also do Advanced Leader for 8 more motors, 8 telescopes and 111 scrith alloy. I also made it to planet ...

Here is a game that uses the chemical elements in a creative way and is not just another quiz.  Merge Elements by Scienchro is basically a "drop and match" game, so it's not groundbreaking, but it is very solidly coded and has its own kind of perks.  As you drop tiles, two matching tiles numbered N produce a tile numbered N+1.  Three matching tiles can produce an N+2 tile, and they can continue to drop and interact.  Side-by-side matching will favor the dropped tile, moving the merged result there, so you can pull a tile off a lower numbered tile by dropping a matching tile to the left or right of it.  As you discover new elements, you get coins. While it does not have the silly fun of the irregularly shaped heads from the Pop Cats game that roll around and merge in between moves, a single drop here can still produce an unusual chain reaction of the tiles.   You can use some of your earned coins to start the game at a higher atomic number. Note that on...

We had about an hour to burn before going to a coworker's wedding, and a board game or card game is a good way to chill out.  I grabbed a few new games last week (Happy Little Dinosaurs, some weird Escape Room card game, and two PackOGames: Bus and Boo), and I felt like Boo would be a good fit.  It's another of the PackOGames series, games with cards the size of sticks of gum, packaged with the clever "PackOGames" (instead of pack of gum) name.  Our previous favorite was Dig, which was described here .   We only got to play Boo one time through.  Basically, the cards are divided into three sets based on the color of the tick marks: black, white or green.  The green cards are used to build the initial gateway to the graveyard, an exact pattern that you always start with.  Each card had three spaces, with either a black ghost, a white ghost or a tombstone.  The basic idea is that you place one card on the board each turn, touching any other card, an...

Org Chem Adventure by NinDiMo really did manage to make a game with chemistry content.  It's a text-based adventure game that follows a kid in search of his father who never returned from a trip to a weird land of chemical landscapes. It does show a few chemical formulas but I would not consider it overly technical. The story itself is oddly original and fantastical/abstract.  You do get to choose some dialog paths.  There are some sensible chemistry puzzles, like betting on which of the listed chemical is more acidic.  Of course you can scroll up a page or two to find the reference guide in the conversation before it. It was a bit annoying that nobody in this world thought anything of a chemist until they are proclaimed to be wizards and then they are worth rescuing. And then it cuts off suddenly. It hasn't been updated since 2017 but I felt it was worth a mention for being different from the rest of the quiz-based apps I have seen.

Molecule makers appear to be the most common class of chemistry-related games on the Android.  There are a lot of games where the challenge is to build specific molecules.  These have a range of styles and difficulty levels, and it is a more informative pasttime than just answering quiz questions.   "Molecule - a chemistry puzzle" (by a.mighty.dish) is very stylish and combines molecule making with an attractive spatial puzzle.  You have to navigate the atoms together in the limited niches provided.  It has not been updated since 2018. Chemistry Lab (by Monster Brain Educational Games) has a few different molecule maker levels.  The first mode is Classic where the atoms come dripping down the three tubes up above and you have to catch only the correct ones in the big beaker.  That's fun for a while.   The next level (Covalent Bonds) has you draw the bonds between atoms to meet certain goals.  Aside from one goofy typo ("Carbon di Oxide")...