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"Treehouse proved to be a great portable game - 9 Icehouse
pieces, a small d6, a printout of the rules, all stuffed into
a small dice bag, it sat happily in the lid of my rucksack with
no perceptible increase in the load. The game proved popular
with Sue, who feels less intimidated by games with a reasonable
quota of luck, and we played on four separate evenings, sitting
in pubs or hostels after a long day tramping St Cuthbert's Way.
Treehouse (like most of Andy Looney's games) has no strategic
planning, but it has nice little tactical puzzles along the way,
and each round only takes a few minutes to complete. Best of
all it cost me nothing (except a little ink to print out the
rules) since I already own Zendo." -- Nimrod's
blog entry, "Andy
Looney's perfect travelling companion"
   
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Coming Soon: Martian Coasters! |
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 I
feel like I've been on quite a roll lately, at least from a game-inventing standpoint.
Last week (and last
month) I talked about major breakthroughs I've made in the
development of the rules for Just
Desserts, and it was still pretty recently (January 7th)
that I first came up with Treehouse,
a game which has reshaped our entire way of thinking about Icehouse
pyramids. The Treehouse Revolution, as I like to call it, triggered
the need for another new product, a booklet called 3HOUSE
(which was supposed to be for sale by now but is still only half
written -- sorry about the delay, folks) plus my time has been
needed for everything from Fluxx
Espanol and the Holy
Fluxx expansions to Are
You A Werewolf? 3rd Edition and Stoner Fluxx 2.0 (not to
mention our big events at Origins
and Gen-Con).
So lately, I've been very very busy.
And in between all of that, I've also been quietly working
on yet another new game. This week, I'm happy to announce that
it's called Martian Coasters and it will be going to the printer
soon. Woo-hoo!
And what are Martian Coasters? They're a set of 4 colorful
4" beverage coasters, each featuring a small gameboard.
They'll work great right out of the package for the "Where
Can I Put Down My Beverage?" game, but to play the game
of Martian Coasters, you will also need a Treehouse set and a
standard D6.
Each player gets 3 pyramids of one color, which are distributed
around on the 3 gameboards other than the one featuring that
player's color. The object is to move all of your pyramids onto
the board of your color and into a nested stack on the center
of that board. Here's what a typical game in progress looks like:
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The spaces on the boards have small triangles which indicate
the directions in which pieces may be moved, since there are
limits to where you may go; meanwhile, the distance each piece
may travel is determined by its size, and limited by the luck
of your die rolls. Best of all, the Treehouse die is also rolled
during each turn, providing a variety of wacky actions which
include rotating the coasters, swapping pairs of coasters, and
even "hopping" a coaster to another edge, breaking
the universe out of its initial square configuration. When you
roll TIP, you get to "Totally Increase Points" by changing
your other die roll to a 7. And of course, WILD works just as
you'd expect, letting you choose one of the other 5 actions.
Martian Coasters was another of those game designs of mine
that popped almost fully formed into my head (unlike Just Desserts,
which I've been tinkering with
for
years).
I've been quietly playtesting Martian Coasters all summer, and
the rules have barely changed at all from what I first described
in my inventor's logbook on Sunday, May 21.
Martian Coasters has proven to be such a fun little game,
and it's so cool the way it expands the Treehouse set, that we
couldn't resist fast-tracking it into production, ahead of 3HOUSE
even, so that (for one thing) I can promote it in 3HOUSE's closing
section.
It should be noted that Martian Coasters (the product) will
contain only the actual Martian Coasters (the game components)
meaning you'll need to provide your own pyramids and dice to
play Martian Coasters (the game itself). Notice also that there
are 3 different things you could be referring to with the name
Martian Coasters. (We thought about trying to differentiate them
by calling the actual game Martian Fire-Drill, but that just
added to the confusion.)
Although it might seem at first like Martian Coasters can
be played only with a Rainbow Treehouse set, look again: the
arrowheads feature the colors of the pieces in the Xeno set,
thus providing full compatibility.
If all goes as we hope it will, Martian Coasters will be for
sale in game stores everywhere this November!
Thanks for reading, and have a great week! (Thanks also to
everyone who helped me play-test Martian Coasters this summer,
in particular Josh,
who first got me thinking about a new board game, and the
Other Kristin, who suggested a couple of tweaks including
the TIP rule.)
 Thanks
for reading, and have a great week!
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Inspiration is like lightning: you never know when or where
it will strike. Often ideas occur during a (brain)storm, when
you can kind of expect it, but sometimes they strike totally
out of nowhere. Depending on how interesting the idea is, and
what else is going on and such, I will often go into a sort of
trance, becoming deep in thought, pondering the idea, running
thought experiments, etc. And of course, after 16 years of marriage
(Happy Anniversary to us tomorrow, dear!) my wife Kristin
can read me like a book, and she can tell as soon as I'm getting
one that I'm having an idea. Sometimes I'll go off on my ponderings,
knowing that she's waiting for me to snap back to reality and
tell her about the idea I just had, and sometimes I do; other
times, I'll insist on having more time to think about it before
explaining whatever the idea is. And that's what it takes, to
get time to ponder an idea before presenting it to Kristin, at
least for any idea I have while she's nearby... she's so good
at noticing when an idea has occurred to me that even when I
try to totally keep that fact to myself, she's always asking
"What did you just think of?" (It's a good thing she
doesn't play poker with me, she'd probably be great at picking
up on my tells.) |
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"I tell people now that this extradition attempt is
a blessing, because it has galvanized the world movement for
cannabis peace. It has given me an even stronger personal urge
to have marijuana legalized in Canada within two years, and I
am given opportunity in regular media exposure to be a proud
spokesperson for our great culture. I am not afraid of the task
ahead of me. I am not afraid of jail for the rest of my life,
undoubtably painful as that would be. I don't fear prison rape
or abuse or suffering or lonliness, though those miseries will
no doubt be present in a US federal prison. My fear is that the
marijuana people will continue to be taken away to lives of ruin
and despair by a murderous police state. My fear is that Canada
will be absorbed as a compliant puppet state of the US War on
Drugs. My fear is that the DEA, with offices in 65 nations around
the Earth, will have more and more citizens from other countries
extradited to the USA to face draconian punishments for the rest
of their lives." -- Marc
Emery's Message |
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"The media focuses relentless attention on the president,
on the premise that he is actually the chief executive. But for
all intents and purposes, Cheney is chief, and Bush is more in
the ceremonial role of the queen of England. Yet the press buys
the pretense of Bush being 'the decider,' and relentlessly covers
Bush -- meeting with world leaders, cutting brush, holding press
conferences, while Cheney works in secret, largely undisturbed.
So let's take half the members of the overblown White House press
corps, which has almost nothing to do anyway, and send them over
to Cheney Boot Camp for Reporters. They might learn how to be
journalists again, and we might learn who is running the government."
-- Robert Kuttner, "The
Cheney presidency" |
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