Thursday, September 8th 2005

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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Again this week, I stayed home to focus on the job of packing while others from Looney Labs went to a big summer convention without me. This time, it was Dragon*Con I was skipping, and it sounds like I missed a really great time. Once again, Russell (our Rabbit Coordinator) did an awesome job of wrangling a team of Mad Lab Rabbits as they put on a wonderful buffet of Looney Gaming events. Once again, Giant Circular Fluxx was tested! And once again, there were vendors selling our games for us on site, so we didn't get a booth of our own and were able to focus everyone's efforts just on demo gaming. Kristin got to spend a lot of time just playing games! Marlene meanwhile headed off to Burning Man, so it was up to me and Alison (who also stayed home) to finalize and send to the printer the Family Fluxx artwork we've all been working so hard on lately. Yay!

There's a lot more I could say here about Dragon*Con, based on what I heard about it (for example, Russell is developing an Icehouse game that uses a set of dominos, which sounds really cool) but since I wasn't there I'm just going to end this section by sending out one more big "Thanks!" to all the Rabbits who worked so hard to make Dragon*Con a success, specifically Josh, Ralph, Marci, Amy, Roy, Jen, Joelle, Marc, Anna, Brian, Phillip, Robert, David, Sharon, Molly, Dave, William, Maria, Jamie, and of course, Russell. Thanks y-all!

Ever since I was a little kid, I've been cutting pictures out of magazines and sticking them up on my walls. Pictures in frames are nice of course, and we do that, too, but sometimes I like to cover a whole wall with a collage of tightly placed images.

In the old days, I used thumbtacks, but 15 years ago when we moved into the house we're in now, I switched to double-sticky tape. (The walls of this 1937 house are solid plaster, and thumbtacks just don't work here they way they do on modern wallboard.)

Double-sided tape has its pros and cons. It has the advantage of not damaging the corners with poke-holes, but it has the disadvantage of being a lot more trouble to move. With thumbtacks (or magnets, if you're working on a metal surface), you can easily take things down, pile them up, and arrange them again later on another vertical surface. But once you go down the double-sticky path, there's no turning back; occasionally the tape will stay on the wall when you try to move it, but usually only by keeping with it a layer of the paperstock it was attached to. Most of the time, the stickiness is forever after a feature of the back of that picture. This means when you take down a collage of this sort, you need to immediately be sticking the images in their new homes, or somehow sealing the stickiness up (like with a layer of single-sided tape).

OK, those of you still reading at this point probably also know that we are preparing to move but that won't be arriving at our new home any time soon. So how then do I solve the problem of needing to take down all the stuff I've stuck to the walls here in the last decade and a half, without having new walls ready to receive them? The answer is, I'm putting it all into a scrapbook. And that's what I've been doing this week.

Kristin got me a big empty scrapbook (and when I say big, I mean enormous; the pages measure 18" x 24") and I've been spending many hours painstakingly taking images off the walls and reassembling them on the huge pages of my new scrapbook. So far, I've finished 12 pages, and there are now many shockingly plain walls in our house. (And yet, as with most of my packing tasks, there's still so much left to do...)

This brings me to the photo shown here. Having removed it from a wall (or more accurately, a filing cabinet), I decided to scan it before pasting it into the scrapbook.

I believe this to be the first photo ever taken of an Icehouse game. I took this picture at the Renn Fair in September 1988, just days or weeks after John first showed me the game he'd come up with based on my original 5 paragraph description. We had agreed to meet up at the Fair and I'd brought my first set (hand-made by Chort) in case we had a chance to try the game.

I was using the blue pieces, and I stepped back from the table to take this photo with my then-very-new Pentax K-1000. That's John on the right, but I have no idea who the third player (or the spectator) was. As far as I recall he was just some other guy at the fair we talked into joining us.

A few years later when we were marketing the Xyloid Icehouse set, and we needed marketing imagery for our all-purpose ad-flyer, I created the drawing below by basically tracing this photo. Later, Dawn drew a better picture of 2 people playing Icehouse, which now appears on page 91 of Playing with Pyramids, which was inspired by the drawing based on the photo.

Finally, in Homeworlds news, there's finally a way to play it online! I haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm certainly excited about it!

But I'm even more excited to say that I think I've finally figured out how to play a satisfying game with more than 2 players that doesn't involve using the Werewolf-style Good & Evil rules. It's so simple I can't believe it took us this long to come up with it!

Here's the rule: You win if you eliminate the player on your left. (If some other player causes their elimination, the game continues without that player and y our goal changes to the new person on your left.)

That's it! That's all it takes! It's basically a standard Attack-Left Defend-Right structure, used in Grand Melee Magic (which inspired Giant Circular Fluxx, the pondering of which got me to this new idea.) We used this same idea long ago when expanding Cosmic Coasters to work with more than 2, so again, I can't believe it took me this long to think of doing this with Homeworlds. But I'm just happy to have figured it out at last.

By way of differentiating it from Classic Homeworlds, I'm calling this Sinister Homeworlds, since Sinister means both Evil and Left.

This new Homeworlds discovery leaves me wanting more than ever to find other people interested in playing Homeworlds with me. Would any of my DC-area readers be interested in meeting up with me for a couple of games this weekend at the College Perk Coffee House?

Thanks for playing our games and reading our webzine, and have a great week!

PS: Happy Anniversary To Us! Kristin and I got married 15 years ago today! Yay! I Love You Kristin!