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 I've
been on a game design roll lately. Last
week I designed Zombie Fluxx, and two
months ago, I came up with a new game for the as-yet-unpublished
Stonehenge game system (to be included in their first expansion).
In between, I've been cooking up some fun new promo card ideas
for the coming year, and to top it all off, I've just created
a really cool new Icehouse game, which I'm really excited about!
Of course, as I demonstrate in my articles on Zombie Fluxx
and Stonehenge, I can talk about a new game idea at great length
without actually revealing much about it, and so it shall be
again this week. (Sorry!)
This new game, Secret Project 3H-1, is testing really well.
I don't wish to announce the name just yet (since I'm not sure
it won't change), nor am I ready yet to reveal much about what
the game is like (let alone post the actual rules). But here's
what I can say: Secret Project 3H-1 is a fast & easy strategy
game for 2 players which was designed specifically to be played
with a 3HOUSE set (which is 3 matching Treehouse
sets).
It's frankly rather amazing how well 3H-1 makes uses of every
piece in the 3HOUSE set. Even though I started with the goal
of using every part of the buffalo and as little else as possible,
it's hard to believe how perfectly it worked out. It's like I
designed the game and then specified the pieces I needed for
it!
And here's the best part: 3H-1 is a game which uses the opaque
pyramids for information hiding! (This is like the Holy Grail
of Icehouse game design... we've been talking for almost a decade
about the game design potential of hollow opaque pyramids, but
to date, there aren't any Icehouse games I'm aware of which are
really successful at this.)
Best of all, it's totally fun. Over the weekend, Carol
ran some playtesting sessions at CODCon, and she said it was
so popular she played it at least 50 times, after which she lost
count. (She even had people borrow her pyramids so they could
keep playing it while she took a break to visit the dealer's
room.)
So what's with all the secrecy? If this game is so cool, why
am I describing it vaguely when I could just post the rules?
Because we've already concluded that this game is good enough
to be published in 3HOUSE (which is, after all, what I was designing
it for). This brings me to the question of why 3HOUSE has been
so long delayed. Well, partly it's because we've been so busy
with the day-to-day work of running the business (including all
the time we've been taking lately to work on writing our new
business plan) so I simply haven't had the time I need to work
on it and get it finished up.
But there's another issue... our original plan was to include
IceTowers
as one of the 3 games (along with Martian
Chess and Binary
Homeworlds) but much as I wanted to believe the game worked
with only 3 trees per player, it really just isn't fun enough
with such a small set of pieces. So we've been quietly looking
for something better suited to the available piece set to include,
and at last I think we've got it! But to help build a fire underneath
my butt and get 3HOUSE finished, I want to keep the new game
unpublished until then.
However, as with Zombie Fluxx,
locals are encouraged to ask me to playtest my new game... if
you're looking for me at the College
Perk Coffeehouse, the best time to find me there is during
the Wednesday night Texas Hold'em tournaments. I'll be hanging
out playing my games with whoever wants to join me, from the
time I wash out of the 7 pm tourney until the start of the 10
pm tourney.
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