Pyramid Pick
Playing with Pyramids: 12 Games for Icehouse Pieces
Published by Looney Labs
Written by Andrew Looney, John Cooper, Kory Heath, Jacob Davenport, and Kristin Looney
128 black and white pages; $12.00
Playing with Pyramids is the latest chapter in the long history of Icehouse, a game as well as a set of pyramid playing pieces from Looney Labs. My first review covered a product called the Martian Chess Set that contained 60 pyramids and the rules for four games. Looney Labs has discontinued that box. Today, they produce the plastic, stackable pyramids in 9 colors and sell them in tubes of 15, known as a "stash." An on-line community of game developers has produced numerous abstract strategy games that utilize them. This book collects twelve of these games.
Playing with Pyramids is by far one of the most impressive gaming documents I have ever read. Even if you have seen the rules on-line (see the "Sortable List of Icehouse's Cool Kindred" at http://www.the-radix.com/0003.php) the book provides updated and rewritten text as well as strategy tips. If you have little interest in abstract strategy games, this book is still an excellent example of organization, clarity, and flavor that can help anyone interested in writing rules for their own games.
The twelve games span a variety of types of play. The simpler games focus on fun rather than deep thinking. IceTowers is a turnless game of stacking pyramids and controlling towers where speed is only sometimes necessary. Thin . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: June 21, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.