User:Jeremiah

Mashups

In the spirit of the remix culture, I offer the following mashup:

1. Ticket to Mars

Who knows, maybe there's more mashups to come.

Thank You

I want to formally say thank you to everyone who's working at getting this Wiki off the ground. I think your efforts are worthwhile, and I've encountered a great sense of community here. Also, an extra thanks to all of you who have commented on my game designs. One of the reasons I posted these games here was to get feedback, and I haven't been disappointed. Thanks again!

Sandbox

All the cool kids are doing it, and I don't want to be left behind.

Licensed External Resources

I hold copyright to several external resources linked from this Wiki, which I am currently unable to upload here.

All of these external resources are licensed for use on this Wiki and elsewhere.

Icebox

I'm going to coin a new term and see if it catches on. An Icebox is a container for Icehouse pieces. These boxes can be home-made or store-bought, and don't necessarily have to be boxes. In many cases, they contain more than just Icehouse pieces. My icebox contains a lot more than just pyramids.

What's in your Icebox?

A Bit About Me

I'm a software developer living in Calgary, Canada. I truly enjoy doing software development, but I also enjoy gaming (of the board and card type, that is). It's my #2 hobby, right after cooking.

I started doing some rather primitive Icehouse game designs a few months ago, and I've now moved them all here to gain more exposure and hopefully more ideas and feedback.

You can read my blog for an idea of what holds my interests outside of work. I rarely blog about work stuff, since, well, it's work, and 99% of the population could care less about the idiosyncracies of C++ VTables in Windows.

Icehouse Game Design

A few months ago, I started playing around with some variants to Volcano. When I realized that they weren't completely awful (perhaps just mostly awful), I started to think a bit more seriously about game design. As a hobby, mind you. I don't have the time or energy at this point to push a game to publication, and it's also quite likely I don't have the talent. But I enjoy it, so I do it.

So far I've only done game designs with Icehouse pieces. I haven't yet started even looking at stuff like Piecepack. I chose Icehouse to start with for several reasons:

1. I already own 9 stashes, so I might as well use them
2. Their versatility is very underexploited, and I think that a larger body of games might help a bit in terms of marketing what I think is an excellent game system
3. There is tons of design space to explore within the Icehouse system
4. Working with an abstract system like Icehouse means that I can have completely lame themes for my designs yet still have a shot at a fun game

My designs so far fall into two broad categories: Volcano variants and everything else.

Volcano Variants

My Volcano variants are all played on hexagonal boards, instead of the usual square-shaped Volcano board. It turns out that the first two of these were designed independently by Jeep, although his take on the rules was ever-so-slightly different from mine.

• Hexano
• Mega Hexano
• Hexano-Duel

Of these three, my favorite is Hexano-Duel. Probably because I find the strategy a bit more engaging, and partly because it's a big enough departure from Volcano that I feel it's almost (but not quite) a game on its own.

Everything Else

I've designed four other Icehouse games to date. They're all over the place in terms of mechanics, theme, and requirements for playing

• Deception
• Triforce
• Triluminary
• Capstone

I suspect that Triluminary might be broken, specifically with respect to the ability to push other pieces off the board. I kind of like Capstone, though I haven't yet tried it with more than two people. In any case, I think these two have more potential than Deception and Triforce.

There's a fifth non-Volcano-variant game in the hopper, something I'm calling Evangelism for now. It's sort of like slow-motion Icehouse, with a bidding mechanic, but it's still way too unrefined to post here (the rules are currently scattered across 9 pages of hand-written notes and random thoughts).

Po

Icehouse game design in general is spurred by some rather interesting po (provocation, of a sort), and as an amateur designer, I'm too-often guilty of relying on established patterns for my designs. As a way to prod myself in different directions, I've started a a semi-public po page. For now, this is just my own small experiment in lateral thinking, but feel free to contribute. If things seem to work out, maybe I'll have to move the page out into the general IcehouseGames.org universe.