Thursday, September 20, 2001

by the Wunderland Toast Society

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• Ember provides us with some must-read quotes and links, along with her own thoughts, on the current crisis, as does Rash
• Dave's got a new Icehouse Game: Turtler
• The rules to Kristin's Martian Backgammon have been changed
• GinohnNews - Folk of the Fringe

Like everyone else, we're flying the flag this week.

Last week, I described what's going on with the next edition of Icehouse and the new book of rules we're developing for it. I said we'd decided to change the title from "9 Games for 60 Pyramids" to "Eleven Icehouse Games", since we didn't want to undervalue 30 or 45 pyramid Icehouse sets and wanted to include more than 9 games.

Well, again this week we've changed our minds. (We pride ourselves on being able to do that.) The 11 games I listed last week omitted Pikemen, and there was a large enough outcry over this to convince me again that it ought to be in the book. More to the point, since we're obviously still tweaking the contents list, it just doesn't make sense to lock into a title that limits us to fewer games than we may ultimately decide to include. Therefore, since we must settle on a title now, we've decided to go with "Playing with Pyramids", with a subtitle like "Twelve Games For Icehouse Pieces" (or whatever the final count ends up being).

As regards the search for a good 2 stash racing game with dice, Kristin's Martian Backgammon is improving with playtesting (as games always do) and other candidates (such as Dave Chalker's Turtler) are coming to our attention. Looks like we're going to have to set up another weekend-long playtesting marathon...

Here's Alison's reply:

We very much apologize for having offended you, but would like to assure you that our intent in putting up the WTC linchpin was not to sell more cards. The image we used on the website was only an imaginary card design -- a theoretical expansion which would be years in the future -- if at all.

Just because Chrononauts is a game does not mean we wish to trivialize the events that are in it (or potentially in it). Rather the intent is to memorialize the events included in the game -- to indicate that it IS an important event. A strange thing about history, is that the closer you are to the present, the harder it is to tell what events will truly be remembered as History (with a capitol H) by those in the future -- i.e it's hard to tell what event is a linchpin when it's occurring. What we're saying is, 'THIS is a linchpin event.'

Much weighty thought was given to which events were, indeed, important enough to warrant linchpins. The terrorist attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon are clearly of that caliber. It, like other tragic events on the timeline, is a horrible event that future time travelers would want to go back and prevent.

We meant no offense. Yours is the only negative e-mail we have received about this weeks update. I hope this reply has assured you that we did not take it lightly nor that we are trying to cash in on it. There is no monetary gain we get from having this illustration on our weekly update -- it's just what's on our minds this week, like everyone else in the country.

--Alison, Kristin and Andy Looney