Ever think you had a great idea but couldn’t quite put it to paper or think how you’d implement it? Then you might be an inventor at heart. Want to see the craziest creations you can come up with, then you might want to look at Great Scott!
Following a successful Kickstarter campaign in April 2016, the first offering from the UK’s Sinister Fish Games is social card drafting game Great Scott – The Game of Mad Invention, now available worldwide from all good hobby games distributors.
With 180 cards featuring clean, clear graphic design, and 60 period illustrations from the British Library Collection, Great Scott! looks as good as it plays.
The game currently has a very respectable 7.4 rating on BoardGameGeek, and is proving a hit with players.
How It Plays
Queen Victoria has summoned inventors from all over the Empire to compete in a grand contest to decide who will earn the title of Royal Inventor.
Players take on the roles of slightly unhinged inventors and construct ridiculous contraptions using Asset and Concept cards in various categories: Animal, Mineral, Vegetable, and Productive, Destructive, and Transportive. After 5 rounds of drafting, each player presents their invention to the other players, who must award secret commendation points to their favourites.
The presentation phase is the heart of the game, with each player describing one of almost a billion bizarre and hilarious inventions, such as the “Amazing Ape Activated Cucumber Conserver”, or the “Colossal Crab Conducted Cabbage Conveyor”.
Inventions are scored for their base value plus bonuses for combining the various card types. In an innovative twist, bonus points are also awarded for alliteration, making inventions such as the “Diabolical Dynamite Deployed Donkey Deterrent” an extremely high scoring creation! The winner is the player with the most points after 3 rounds.
We could definitely use some drafting games that are easier to teach non-gamers and don’t take an entire dinner table to lay out. You can find out more about Great Scott! – The Game of Mad Invention at the Sinister Fish website.
While not working as a Database Administrator, Keith Schleicher has been associated with Gaming Trend since 2003. While his love of video games started with the Telestar Alpha (a pong console with four different games), he trule started playing video games when he received the ill-fated TI-99/4A. While the Speech Synthesizer seemed to be the height of gaming, eventually a 286 AT computer running at 8/12 Hz and a CGA monitor would be his outlet for a while. Eventually he’d graduate to 386, 486, Pentium, and Athlon systems, building some of those systems while doing some hardware reviews and attending Comdex. With the release of the Dreamcast that started his conversion to the console world. Since then he has acquired an NES, SNES, PS2, PS3, PSP, GBA-SP, DS, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One S, Gamecube, Wii, Switch, and Oculus Quest 2. While not playing video games he enjoys bowling, reading, playing board games, listening to music, and watching movies and TV. He originally hails from Wisconsin but is now living in Michigan with his wife and sons.
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