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Miniatur
Wunderland
The
10 Geekiest Pieces of Furniture in the Universe
"I tried out Traitor and I can easily say it's one of
the most fun games I've ever played in a group. Everyone had
a fantastic time, and we're all looking forward to playing it
again soon. Thanks for making it! I was surprised at how negative
some of the online reviews online are, and wanted to let you
know that our experience was really, really good. Thanks!" -- email from Zak D.
Rash has been inside the Beltway for the past month, staying
with the parentals, riding dad's great bike around the old neighborhood,
cleaning out different small parts of the basement, making little
jaunts downtown on the Metro, etc. His
updates feature lots of links & comments on topics including:
a cute webcomic called the Foreign Exchange Student, info on
Building your own Apollo Guidance Computer, the truth about Dillinger,
New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans, What WWI was about and the
real reason for [x], lunar thoughts from Buzz Aldrin and Alan
Bean, Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing,
Why we are so fat, time-lapsed YouTube videos, the Individual
Airship, Top Ten Comic Book Cities, the World's Five Creepiest
Places, Flags of Forgotten Countries, an actual Death By Chocolate,
the Wink That Changed the World, the Evian roller babies, ants,
Michael Jackson vs Fred Astaire, East German Products, Coconut
M&Ms, How to Avoid Being a Victim of crime in the street,
Abandoned Places in the World, Bailout Costs vs Big Historical
Events, and more.
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Another Great Origins / A
Busy July / Dark Star Park |
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 First
of all, I'd like to apologize for how long the Whenever has been
this time around. As you will see, I've been super busy since
returning from Origins, and I had so much to say about the Big
Experiment that it's taken me an extra long time to put together
my Report.
But here it is at last, a trilogy of game-festival adventures!
From the Booth
to the Halls
to the Lab!
As an aside, I'd like to remind everyone who reads this page
that you can get much more frequent updates about my activities
by following me on Twitter,
FaceBook,
or LiveJournal.
(I update all three places with the same feed of Andy-Info, so
pick your favorite.)
Meanwhile, back at the office, we've been hard at work on
three new products we're moving through the pipeline, with one
set to be released every month:
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Aquarius 2.0: We're
gradually updating all our best sellers in our sweet new uniform
packaging style, and Aquarius is next on the list. This is my
second card game, first published in 1998, and this new edition
features a wide range of updates and improvements, including
snazzier artwork, a new panel type (diagonals), tweaks to the
Action cards (Shuffle Goals changed to Rotate Goals and Shuffle
Hands was added), a new rule that gives you an extra draw when
you connect two elements at once, and perhaps best of all, a
big new full-color rulesheet that includes variations (at several
difficulty levels) for playing with pre-schoolers. We've got
pre-release copies and they look awesome! You can play a demo
copy and get a cool new Zap
a Card Fluxx promo card at your friendly
local game store. The game goes on sale on August 28th.
Martian Fluxx: The
long-awaited Alien-invasion version of Fluxx is finally about
to invade! I'm really excited about this one -- it's my favorite
version yet. Check out the preliminary
webpage for a preview of 9 of the cards. Release date:
September 25th.
Chrononauts 1.4
& The Gore Years: Like Aquarius, Chrononauts
is also about to get upgraded to the new uniform box. But although
it will feature a couple of new cards and a new rulesheet, the
new edition of Chrononauts won't be very different from the original.
For this reason, and since it's the fourth printing, we've decided
to call it version 1.4. However, since a lot has happened since
1999 and Chrononauts is really showing its age, we're also creating
an expansion product that brings the TimeLine into the 21st Century.
This packet of 11 cards will feature 5 new Timeline cards (2000,
2001, 2002, 2003, and 2008) along with 3 new Patches and 3 new
characters who need to change recent events in order to get home.
(Of course, it's called the Gore Years because that's what the
last 8 years are known as to certain time travelers.). Release
date: October 23th.
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 In
other news, I finally did something I've been wanting to do for
20 years: I saw the shadows line up at Dark Star Park!
There's this little sculpture park, see, near the Rosslyn
metro stop in Northern Virginia, featuring these five giant concrete
spheres. Two of the spheres are joined by 4 poles and some marks
on the ground, and every year at 9:32 am on August 1, the shadows
cast by the spheres and the poles align exactly with the markings
on the ground. OK, maybe that doesn't sound so very exciting,
but I've always thought it was a cool idea. I've always wanted
to go check it out, but usually I would forget all about it until
about August 2nd or 3rd. But this year, I finally thought of
it a few days beforehand, and since it was on a Saturday, the
three of us made the pilgrimage.
Obviously, I really dig Dark Star Park. It's a really nifty
urban landscape. But there's more to this story than simply enjoying
art: Dark Star Park played a vital role in the creation of the
Icehouse game system. Here's why:
I was so inspired by my first visit to Dark Star Park that
I described a similar place (named New Xi City) in a short story
I wrote in 1987. (This was back when I was an aspiring writer,
and had never even thought of becoming a game designer. I didn't
even know that was something you could do.)
This story later became chapters 37-40 of The
Empty City, but originally it was a 5-part postcard series
I mailed out to a bunch of my friends. (This was back in the
olden days, of course, before we had webpages we could just post
stuff to.) Each postcard featured an installment of this five
part story called "The Children of Mars," which was
a sequel of sorts to the story I'd written about Icehouse the
year before. That story, called "Icehouse," featured
The
5 Paragraphs That Changed My Life, but if it hadn't been
for the follow-up story, Icehouse might never have gotten beyond
the crazy idea stage. The original story had generated a lot
of enthusiasm, but my initial efforts at game inventing weren't
going anywhere, and interest was falling off. But when I sent
out the Children of Mars story, it got everyone excited again,
and that was when Chort made me that first complete game set,
which got John interested in working on it again, etc etc etc.
And it might never have happened if I hadn't been to Dark Star
Park!
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It was really cool to finally be there for the annual shadow
alignment. It worked out really well too -- turns out this was
actually the 25th anniversary of the creation of the park, and
the artist, Nancy Holt, was in attendance. In fact, the city
made quite a little event of it, creating a little festival around
the alignment. And even the weather cooperated, casting wonderful
shadows, as you can see.
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 There's
lots of other stuff I could talk about, since it's been such
a busy month, but instead I'll just tantalize you with this photo
of me dressed up as the Evil Wizard from my new game Are
You The Traitor?. Check out the awesome
video Alex made of our group playing the game, then get ready
for the next film, which features our whole group dressed up
as the game's characters!
 Thanks for reading and have a great whenever!
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We've been playtesting a Zark
City rules revision: adding an automatic card draw to each
turn. There's already a strong need to cycle through cards, and
I hate having to stop myself from grabbing at the draw pile at
the start of my turn. That's like a signature Andy Looney game
design element now, so I think this game should have it. Yes,
you can still choose to Draw 3 more as a turn option. This makes
it more Fluxx-like: Draw 1, Take 1 Action, comply with Hand Limit
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I learned a great road-trip game while driving back from
Origins with Alison (who'd just learned about it from my Arch-Colleague,
James Ernest). It's called French Toast. It's best described
as a cross between Zendo and 20 Questions. I really enjoyed it,
much more so than either Zendo or 20 Questions, because it also
has an Apples-to-Apples element of strange comparisons. ("Is
it more like Clowns, or more like the Idea of Clowns?") |
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I recently learned that my Kolbe
Index number is 7-4-6-4. The Kolbe Assessment "measures
a person's instinctive method of operation (MO), and identifies
the ways he or she will be most productive." While that
may sound like a lot of psycho-babble, I've actually found the
test results extremely revelatory and eye-opening, even life-changing.
We all took the test together, so now everyone at Looney Labs
has this new perspective on each other's work styles. It's very
cool to have gained this better understanding of the different
ways in which different people do things. |
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