mun Nanseki invited me here to talk about icehouse so im gonna talk about icehouse :D
it has a wiki, and it used to have a forum, but these days everything happens on discord and facebook, so its nice to talk about it here ^^
the short version is that Andy Looney was writing a sci-fi novel called The Empty City and he wanted to include a sci-fi looking board game. his friends helped him invent such a game. it's about building and invading fortresses by placing your pyramids upright (for a fortress) or flat (for an invader). they called it 'Icehouse', and then they made it for real and it looks like this:
By Raincomplex at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Quadell using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6570335
the slightly longer version is that Icehouse is almost great. it's pretty clever, but the rules have a lot of rough edges. and this is, in my opinion, where things get really fun. because when something is 'almost great', there's space to make derivative versions of it. and oh boy are there a lot of icehouse-inspired games. most of them keep the cool rainbow triangles but completely change the rules.
officially to be called a 'starship captain' in the icehouse community you have to have a list of your ten favorite games, and im sure i could produce such a list, but to be honest im mostly here to talk about just a few of them:
Zendo, a logic puzzle where the pyramids are used for their physical properties, as rocks you can stack in a zen garden. everyone makes sculptures and then the game master informs you that some structures "have the buddah nature" and others do not, and it is the other players' task to uncover the logic of this secret rule. it's usually something simple like "there is a red piece on top", but you'd be surprised how much fun it can be to deduce even a simple rule with these pieces to play with!
Homeworlds, a pure strategy game using four colors of pieces to represent four types of starship technology: green is fabrication, blue is transmutation, yellow is transport, and red is infiltration. basically: build lots of ships and then attack each other to destroy and/or steal their stuff.
Ice Towers, a direct successor to the original Icehouse. the game is something like card solitaire where pieces are stacked up following certain rules, except that the goal is for your color to end up on top of the stack at the end. notably, there is no turn taking in this game. you can play moves as soon as they become available, or you can wait to see if a better move becomes available. you are allowed and encouraged to bargain with other players. "we're both losing right now. i'll split a tower here if you split a tower there, deal?"
oh yeah also notably, all three of those games are played "boardless", directly on the table, which i think is really cool and fun.
of these three, Zendo is the slowest and most contemplative, which i think lends it very well to forum play. ive even written my own homebrewed version which can be played on a whiteboard or drawing program, i call it graph zendo since the structures look less like rock stacks and more like powerpoint slides. id be totally down to host it here if anyone's interested!
