Pyramid Arcade

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The Looney Labs’ Kickstarter campaign for Pyramid Arcade is wrapping up today and I wanted to get a little post up to explain why I’m so excited to see this project succeed in such a big way. 

The pyramids were originally conceived in Andy’s novel, The Empty City, but the concept wasn’t fully fleshed out until readers expressed interest in the game that was described in the story. Andy spent much of last couple of decades creating games with the components described in his novel. Over the years, they have taken on many iterations: solid and hand-poured, folded cardboard, wooden, gigantic versions for convention play, and the stackable versions that most people are used to playing. They were sold in a standard boxed single game format (Zendo & IceTowers), as separate components with free online access to the rules (like Andy’s favorite pyramid game, Homeworlds), and as portable independent games (Pink Hijinks, IceDice, and Treehouse). The pyramids even appeared in a video game developed by Andy called IceBreaker. Pyramid Arcade takes many of these games and bundles them into one box! There are hundreds of games you could play with this set and rules for 22 from Andy, plus another ten from fans.

I worked with the Looneys for several years, and when I first started out with them I knew very little about the pyramid games. When I went to Toy Fair for the first time as a Looney Labs employee, I met Lincoln Damerst & Nikki Pontius (you can see both of them on  BoardGameGeek’s GameNight series) and they told me about the popularity of Zendo, a game designed by Kory Heath and a pyramid fan favorite - it's also on the 100 games list and I'm hoping to get to play with Kory one day :). Lincoln & Nikki also taught me how to play IceDice, a light press your luck game designed by Andy. I spent all of my down time at Toy Fair 2012 playing IceDice and I highly recommend you play this game. It’s portable, quick, and lots of fun. 

While these games were some of the early products sold by Looney Labs, they were eventually overshadowed by the success of Fluxx. Fans never stopped playing with the pyramids and the Looneys and I often talked about the need for one big deluxe bundle but we all knew how much work it would be (22 games at once instead of one is a tall order!) and there were so many other projects the team was busy with that hadn’t been tried before, like Loonacy and Just Desserts. There were also really exciting licensing projects - Batman, Adventure Time, Firefly, Ugly Doll, Mad Libs, oh my! Meanwhile we were also working on the new logo and visual update of the company brand, which meant touching every single game box, display, web page, sell sheet, business card, etc. UGH! Priorities! 

When the Looneys were ready to begin the project, I was wrapping up my time with them. They reached out to Eileen Tjan for the illustration, graphic design and some of the video work for Pyramid Arcade.  I found Eileen through some mutual friends a few years ago and highly recommend you check out her work. She designed the logo for this blog for me and she is also responsible for the update of the Looney Labs logo and packaging for the core edition of Fluxx. She was based in DC when we first started working together and now works from Chicago, having recently established Other Studio there. She did such a great job understanding the richness and depth of the history of Looney Labs and representing it visually, and I am really happy to see how well she captured the history of the pyramids and Looney Labs in this project.  

Decades of effort from Looney Labs and its friends went into the Pyramid Arcade, so I hope you join me in backing the project! It’s an amazing game bundle unlike anything else I’ve ever seen and I’m so excited to get my copy - it includes some never-seen-before favorites of mine like Color Wheel, Fiesta Caldera, and Petri Dish. Andy calls it his magnum opus and I think he's right. And if you ever get the chance, play Launchpad 23 with Kristin (it is worth it just to hear her rocket launch sound effects). 

Game 5: Can't Stop

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If you haven't played this classic, correct that immediately! Can't Stop is a very accessible press your luck game by Sid Sackson, and it's super fun. My vintage copy came from eBay but Can't Stop is now back in print by Eagle-Gryphon Games and in local game stores AND there's a phone app available that is great for pass and play. On each turn, you roll the four dice and divide them into two combinations of two dice each. You move a white placeholder pawn up a space for those combinations in up to three of the numbered columns from two to twelve. After your three placeholders are each allocated to a column, you can choose to continue to roll but if you can't make a combination from subsequent rolls that allows you to advance at least one placeholder pawn per roll, you've busted. Busting is not good. You lose your progress for your turn. I do this a lot. If you have more self-control than I do, you'll stop rolling before you bust and you'll get to put a marker of your color in the columns you advanced in. The first person to advance three markers of their color to the top of the columns (laid out like a bell curve on an octagonal stop sign-shaped board) wins the game.

I played Can't Stop for the first time at a game night hosted by the Looneys a couple of years ago. I did pretty well (but I didn't win - Gina is the champion of Can't Stop at the Looney game night). Even so, I was hooked pretty quickly. I hadn't played in awhile but came back to the game when I visited the Steve Jackson Games office a couple of months ago. I played with Phil Reed, his wife, Gina, and Rhea, the SJ Games Marketing Director - it was a particularly funny game because neither Phil nor I seemed to be able to get on the board at all. It felt like Rhea & Gina made enough progress that each time I rolled I had to do so much catching up to get even with them that I literally couldn't stop rolling the dice. Which inevitably resulted in busting and not getting on the board again. I learned nothing from the tortoise and the hare. And this tension is why this game is so good.

Sid Sackson is awesome. Every time I post about Can't Stop, game designers friends say things like, "Sid Sackson is the man." Eagle-Gryphon ran a Kickstarter a few years ago to republish a signature series of some of his games. He won the Spiel des Jahres in 1981 for Focus and he was nominated for Can't Stop in 1982. He's also the designer of many beloved games like Acquire. And from the very little I know, he's contributed so much more to game design and the game industry. 

When Phil and I played, he mentioned Sid Sackson's book, Gamut of Games, had a piece on Solitaire Dice I should read. If you're interested it is available as a free download for Kindle (for Prime members). Solitaire Dice is the beginning of Sid working out Can't Stop. All you need is five dice and paper and pencil to play. You're attempting to balance allocating your combinations of two dice among the fewest number of columns and balancing your fifth "reject" die allocation among three different numbers over the course of the game. Once you've rejected one of your three chosen reject numbers eight times (tracked by tally on paper), the game is over. You lose points for any combinations between two and twelve you've hit fewer than five times. If you've hit a combo five times, it zeroes out, and anything above a tally of five scores inversely to the likelihood of rolling it (70 points for each eleven combo more than five but only twenty points for each seven combo over five tallies since it's more likely to be hit). Sackson offers advice on how to play the game multiplayer with everyone working off the same rolls of five dice but hiding their allocations from each other. It's amazing to see the difference in elegance between Can't Stop and Solitaire Dice. It's a great insight into game development. I always thought the stop sign design of Can't Stop was ugly and wasn't a big fan of the aesthetic of the game but I really appreciate how functional it is. And you really can't argue with a game that has stayed alive in some fashion since 1980 - 36 years now. A+, will play again :), #DontStopTilYouGetEnough

 

 

Game 3: Fluxx

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I love Fluxx but anyone who knows me knows that I am biased.  I worked for Looney Labs for the past 3 years, so until September Fluxx was a big part of my life because it’s a big part of the Looney Labs product line.  Fluxx was designed by my friend, Andy Looney, almost 20 years ago and now comes in many shapes & flavors in addition to his design: Star Fluxx for the sci-fi fans; Zombie & Cthulhu Fluxx for the people that gobble up anything with zombies or Lovecraft; Holiday Fluxx for determining if your family really loves each other; and more recently Batman and Adventure Time Fluxx!  I’m also fortunate enough to have played most of Andy’s unpublished Fluxx prototypes - Math Fluxx is way more fun that it might sound, especially if you geek out over numbers like I do.

The first time I played Fluxx was rather dizzying. Kristin, Looney Labs' CEO & Andy's wife, coached the table of new players but it took a few hands before the hilarious chaos really sunk in. The winning conditions of Fluxx are simple - usually to collect two keeper cards that match the goal card that is in play. What happens between the default “draw one, play one” rules that mark the beginning of the game and one player satisfying the goal card is anyone’s guess, or what I like to call controlled chaos.  You might talk like a pirate to draw an extra card on your turn, you might dig through the discard pile to find the action card that lets you steal another player’s keeper, or someone might play a hand limit that makes you discard everything but one card when you’re holding the keepers that would let you win on your very next turn.  

Some people say that there is no strategy to Fluxx, that it’s too random, that winning is dependent on the cards you draw, which vary wildly, as does the length of the game.  It’s true that the goal of the game is incredibly simple - it’s like playing Go Fish for matches, but that is exactly what I find appealing.  It’s very simple to teach to non-gamers and it's obvious what it takes to win but the combination of that simplicity and the fun of using the cards you have to prolong your turn keep and digging for what you need to win happens in a way that anyone can pick up and learn. You don’t need to understand anything about gaming, you just have to be able to read the cards to play, which makes it a great introduction to more complicated card games.  

I’m very grateful to Kristin & Andy for letting me work with them on Fluxx over the past few years. I’ve been able to be a part of working with many talented artists (Ian McGinty, Adam Levermore, Brooke Allen, Derek Ring, Eileen Tjan), deciding which games go to print but the most fun I’ve had with Fluxx is seeing how many people LOVE it. People that play it during hospital stays, during camping events, waiting in line at conventions and with their loved ones at parties.  It really hit me one day what a phenomenon Fluxx had become when a little girl came to a local gaming event and brought a Fluxx deck she had designed - Dog Fluxx - complete with chocolate, squirrel & veterinarian creepers. She had been playing with her parents since she began to read. It’s such a fun platform for any theme and I feel super lucky to have been a part of it.  And I can’t wait to see the super shiny Firefly Fluxx come out early next year! 

BTW, if you're on Instagram and you haven't already followed Looney Labs, you should! Debbie Lee takes the prettiest game pics for the crew at the Lab!