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Thursday, March 12th, 2009

PDF of an interesting historical document from 1990 called An Odd Letter From Kit To John, which set forth the standard dimensions of the Icehouse pyramids

Atomic Rocket: Future Games listing features Icehouse/Homeworlds OgreCave reviews WW5

Is there a numbered list of your Icehouse games?

This week I have the great pleasure of announcing that, in June, we'll be publishing my new game Are You The Traitor?, a fast-playing game of secrets and bluffing for 4-10 players.

It's the moment of truth in your quest to destroy the Evil Magic Key. The adventurers have encountered two Wizards: an Evil Wizard who wants the Key, and a Good Wizard who can destroy it. Unfortunately, you can't tell them apart because the Evil Wizard looks exactly like the Good Wizard! So, who do you give the Key to? Choose quickly, before the Evil Wizard realizes who has it and grabs you! And be careful who you listen to -- one of your trusted guards is secretly a Traitor!

To play, everyone is dealt a card assigning them a role. You could be the Good Wizard, the Evil Wizard, the Traitor, the Key-Holder, or a Guard. The Traitor and the Guards know who the Key Holder is, but only the Wizards know which is Good and which is Evil. The game proceeds as an open discussion about who might be the Traitor, which Wizard is Evil, etc, until someone makes a move that ends the round. If something Good happens (such as a Guard grabbing the Traitor or the Good Wizard being given the Key) then the Good players win the round, whereas the Evil Wizard and the Traitor win if the Evil Wizard gets the Key (or the Good players make a mistake).

After each round, everyone on the winning team gets a Treasure card, with values ranging from 1-5 points. As soon as someone gets 10 points, that player wins!

We'll be officially debuting Are You The Traitor? at Origins, but it will also go on sale at the same time in game stores everywhere, so if you can't join us for the first ever Traitor Tournament at Big Experiment #10, then make sure your Friendly Local Game Store pre-orders the game! (For those who like to buy online, we'll be accepting pre-orders at LooneyLabs.com when we get closer to release time.)

In other news, this is Susannah, our newest office temp. She's taking over where Nikki left off, and so far she's been working out great! We're still plowing through the huge stack of sales leads we returned from Toy Fair with, so it's great to have more help again in the customer service and sales support departments. She's starting to answer the phones now too, so if you're a Store Owner calling to get in on the cool new Superstore promotion we were pitching at Toy Fair, Susannah is the one who'll be entering your order. (And remember, Store Owners, the deadline for that is March 15th!)

Susannah is a native College Parker-er and a senior at UMD with a History major and a Computer Science minor.  She wants to be a research librarian, combining her love of books, people, and, well, research. When her time is not being consumed by silliness on the net, she enjoys knitting, learning how to bake, volunteering for various political causes, and text messaging in full sentences with correct capitalization and punctuation. She is uncommonly fond of really spicy ramen.

Anyway, welcome aboard Susannah! Thanks for helping us sell games!