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 Merry
Xmas! Happy New Year! Here's hoping you are having a great holiday
season.
If you haven't already seen it yet in the recent issue of
Notes
From the Lab, our Holiday
Gift this year is the rules to my new pyramid game Pharaoh.
I'm pleased to note that it's already showing up on Starship
Captain's top ten lists! It plays best with 3 or 4 (although
2 can play as well). All you need is a Rainbow or Xeno Treehouse
set and a Volcano board. Give it a try!
Also, since this year's gift was just a download, we created
a coupon code worth $5 at our online
gift store. If you haven't already used it yet for holiday
shopping, you can still use it to get something fun for yourself
-- it's good until Jan 15th. You'll find the code in the Notes
From the Lab.
Speaking of Starship
Captains and their top ten lists, that idea
is taking off wonderfully. The term is definitely catching on,
the concept is definitely getting pyramid fans to both list their
favorite games and to learn more games so that they know enough
to qualify. All of which is clear from watching the activity
on our new fan club website.
Also, we finally have a new fan
club website! We've been gradually announcing the new site
over the course of the past few weeks and we already have a lot
of Lab Techs signed up and helping us build out the site. Best
of all, we already have almost 40 registered Starship Captains
in the system!
The new fan club site
provides a community communication tool which many of our fans
have been begging us to create for years, namely forums. And
we've already got some fascinating forum discussions going over
there, on everything from important rule clarifications to silly
stuff like your favorite color of pyramid. Of particular note
for Volcano fans is the new spin-off game we've been trying out
lately, called Caldera.
A new fan posting I found particularly interesting was Ryan
Hackel's Stereotypical
Starship Captain List, in which he compiles statistics using
the first 33 Starship Captain lists posted at the new site, and
listing them in order of their average rankings. Of course, I
can't help but notice that while the top 3 games -- Volcano,
Zendo, and Homeworlds, in that order -- were all designed by
friends of mine, all of the other top 11 games are by me. What's
really amazing is that Pharaoh -- the new game I just released
-- is already at #5 on the hit parade! Anyway, thanks so much
to Ryan for crunching these numbers, and to all of the members
of the rapidly-growing Icehouse Academy of Starship Captains
for posting their lists! Welcome aboard, Captains!
In other news, we're eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first
sample decks of Pirate Fluxx from the printers. We're on schedule
to begin shipping advance
demo copies in January! And to help get everyone excited
about the debut, we made a little video
explaining the cool new stuff in this awesome new version. Special
thanks to my pirate friends Chort & Paula, Davy & Rink,
and Kevin, for the spirited gameplay I captured on camera!
Anyway, we have other cool stuff in the works too, like that
secret project we've started working on with famous dragon artist
Larry Elmore, and of course the upcoming relaunch of Treehouse
with the new game IceDice... but details on those will have to
wait until next year.
 Thanks for reading, thanks for playing our games,
and happy holidays!
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