ScottVee Gaming

Here's an odd tangent into the world of games ... there's a country store a few exits up the highway from where we live, and they have a really odd diversion to get customers to come back. As you walk in, there's this quaint sign challenging you to find Millie the Cow, which is a little plastic toy that they move around the store from day to day.  So, it's a kind of scavenger hunt.  Very simple, but when we're in the area we just think, "Let's stop and find that little cow again."  So we scour the shelves, finding some groceries we need along the way (so it succeeds are a marketing trick), and it's just fun looking for the thing.  I don't know why, but we almost start whispering, like it can somehow hear us and hide.  That's nuts.  It's a tiny plastic cow.  But here she is, hiding in the pickle relish ... FOUND IT! So we go up to the counter and tell them where we found Millie.  And they have to offer us a lollipop, but neither of us ca...

Lottery tickets are an interesting kind of non-game.  I got a few Scratchers today as an odd holiday challenge, and I have to start off by saying I do NOT recommend buying these Scratchers for any reason.  They are designed to tickle any kind of gambling genes you might have.  They give you the illusion of choice, make you feel like you almost won, and give minimal wins to make you feel like you have more of a chance than you actually do. They are not games by any stretch of the imagination, but they do a good job of capturing the iconography of games and social trends.  These crossword and bingo styled cards give you a set of letters or numbers that you have to scratch off, and in the end you have to count how many words you made (or some other pattern) to see if you "won" or not.  These cards really make you work for it.  Along the way you feel like you are actually playing a game, but you are just unveiling the things that were already printed on the car...

I got Land vs Sea a few months ago but we never had a chance to try it until yesterday.  It looked like a pretty simple tile-placing game, and sure enough, that sums it up.  Each player has two tiles in their hand, and each tile is two sided.  So you have 4 patterns you can play.  Some have a symbol to play again, and some have a symbol to steal a tile from another player.  Otherwise, each turn you play a tile and try to complete a land or sea area, depending on which side you're playing. To actually capture some areas is a lot trickier than you might think.  After a while, I found myself counting how many land edges or sea edges I need to complete each area.  But sometimes, just having the land-land-sea-land edges you need doesn't mean the tile solves the problem for you.  That piece of land of arm of the sea might escape in a new direction. When you do complete an area, you get one point for each tile the area appears on, plus one point for any ...

With a subtitle like "Smile, the End is Near," it's pretty easy to guess the tone of Happy Little Dinosaurs.  But I guess if they called it Sad-Ass Mopey Dinosaurs Who Are Totally Doomed, it would be a hard sell. It's a cute idea, and the cards all have sad dinosaurs.  They are very well drawn with a solid and likeable art style.  And most of the cards have pretty funny blurbs explaining the actions and disasters they show. Gameplay was simple.  Each turn you turn over a disaster card, then each player plays an action card face down.  Flip those cards together.  The player with the highest card gets the points shown on the card, but the player with the lower points gets to add the disaster card to their character folio -- they also get the points on their action card and one point for each disaster card they own.  Because, as the game says, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The goal is to be the first to move your dino-meeple up to space #50 on...

What can you say about Uno, except that you match the color or number on the card at the top of the discard pile and try to get rid of all your cards first?  Sure, there are a few others cards: Reverse does nothing with just two players, but Skip will skip the next player and +2 skips them and also makes them draw 2 cards.  There is a Wild that matches any color.  The Wild +4 matches and makes the next player draw 4 cards, but you can only play it if you have no valid match, otherwise the target player can challenge you and if they catch you bluffing you're the one who has to draw cards. We got a pack of Minecraft Uno cards at a $5-and-under shop called Five Below, and the cute characters made it a little more fun to play than the usual solid colors.   Rather than calling out numbers, we would call out Sheep, Wolf, Wolf, Creeper ... which was odd but hard to resist. The box itself was full of tiny text, mostly in Spanish, and lots of logos, that I wrote about in...

Idle Planet Miner posted an update this morning (12/21), where the main new addition is a Space Station near the center of the map.  The Space Station has a tree of new goals and powers based on energy cells, which you win in Tournaments.  Now, I have never seen a Tournament screen in the game, but it sounds like this is the bottom icon which issues a challenge to sell your galaxy and see how fast you get back up to a million.  That Challenge screen says nothing about energy cells, though.  So that wasn't very well rolled out. Still, I've been thinking of selling my galaxy again anyway, since there's not much left to build or research.  I've already hit the very last smelter recipe and last crafter recipe. Let's see ... my galaxy value is $49.78Q, which is worth 1235 credits (x2 if I use 100 of the dark matter than I just got through playing Dice Dreams on Tapjoy).  Double the credits for 2470.  Click the Sell button.  Step one is new rooms. ...

After a holiday gathering with the annual Gift Exchange/Steal, we sat down for a few hands of Exploding Kittens, which I have never actually played before.  I've seen the cards, but the grotesque art was not my cup of tea.  Sure, there are some funny puns in there, but there's also a guy barfing in another guy's mouth.  But what's important is the gameplay, and it was devious and hilarious. It's so simple ... the deck is seeded with enough Exploding Kitten cards for all but one player, and if you draw an Exploding Kitten card, you're out of the hand.  You can defuse it with a Defuse card, otherwise, the only way to survive is to avoid drawing cards.  Use the Skip card to skip your turn, or an Attack or Targeted Attack card to make another player take two turns.  You can See the Future to look at the top 3 cards but not rearrange them, so you can plan a better move.  Or use Alter the Future to actually rearrange those cards and give yoursel...