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 A
few weeks ago, I posted a new version of What's
on the Stove?, which is what I call my annual-ish description
of all the new stuff we're working on publishing.
This week, I am updating the Stove page again. This time,
however, I'm doing something a little different. Usually, by
the time I get around to refreshing the Stove page, it's been
so long and so much has changed that I spawn a new copy of the
page, keeping the old one around in the archive. That way, readers
can go back in time, so to speak, to see how far we've come in
the pursuit of our manifold goals. It's also cool to look at
the older Stoves, since many ideas are not followed through with,
or evolve into other ideas, and it's neat to see how our plans
change and expand.
Anyway, as we work on developing the plans for what we currently
have cooking, we've had enough changes and new ideas to make
me want to freshen up the newly updated document, and since it's
still February, I've decided just to make some corrections and
additions to the current document, rather than create a whole
new copy.
That said, for the benefit of my regular readers, here's a
summary of what's new in the new What's on the Stove? document.
The first update concerns our plan for Beta-testing Just
Desserts. Instead of making a small print-run to be shared
with a limited few, we're going to make a big print-run, much
like the one we did for Chrononauts, and let everyone who wants
to try it buy a copy. Regarding Volcano,
the question of what colors we should include in the set has
been answered. The Stove page now sports place-holder logo art
for Fluxx Jr, Fluxx Reduxx, and Just Desserts, but more importantly,
I've also posted the planned
cardlists for Fluxx Jr. and Fluxx Reduxx! The very sketchy
ideas for Triple Fluxx Goals have solidified into a plan for
a series of booster-pack products Goal Crazy. Lastly, the most
significant new item on the Stove is our plan for yet another
boxed Icehouse set, this one featuring Martian
Chess.
Why Martian Chess? Well, partly because it's a proven winner,
consistently being named as one of people's favorite Icehouse
games. It's easy to learn yet it's got a twist that grabs you
and confounds traditional strategic thinking. We featured it
as one of the 4 best games for the pyramids in 1999, when we
released the new version of the system under the name Icehouse:
The Martian Chess Set, which won
the Origins Award for best board game of the year. This version
of the game has long been out of print, since the clear
plastic boxes we were using didn't work out as well as we'd
hoped, and the 4-games-in-1 concept proved more confusing than
compelling. So we've been moving forward with single-game oriented
boxed sets instead, and until now, hadn't gotten around to planning
for Martian Chess.
One reason for this is the fact that Martian Chess makes rather
odd use of the pyramids. Instead of assigning a full stash of
pyramids to one player, as happens in many games, each player
in Martian Chess gets just 9 pyramids, 3 of each size, and since
color is meaningless in this game, each player also needs to
have an assortment of colors. Furthermore, given the way the
game uses a standard chessboard, you can only play with 2 or
4 players, and in both of those cases, you always have leftover
pieces going unused, which is so inelegant as to feel wrong.
Indeed, the
fiction describes the perfect Martian Chess set as being
one with 36 pyramids, all of a single color. Obviously, such
a set wouldn't be useful for any games other than Martian Chess,
and while the boxed sets focus the attention on a single game,
we don't want to lose sight of the idea that the pyramids can
be used for many games other than the first one you started with.
For all of these reasons, we've never seriously considered doing
a Martian Chess boxed set until now.
What changed? Well, it started with the discussions we were
having about what colors to use for Volcano. Fans have been clamoring
for us to make opaque gray pyramids, and we were considering
using that as the color for the caps... but this is troublesome
since we plan to include caps in the small size only, and that
wouldn't really satisfy the fans' desire to have gray Icehouse
pieces.
 Then
it occurred to me that a set featuring 3 colors, black, white,
and the new gray, would be very attractive-looking. And then
I realized something really important: with 3 stashes, each player
could be assigned one piece of each size and each color, and
that a five player game would make complete and perfect use of
each pyramid in the box. All we needed was a 5-player chessboard!
Then we could say "For 2-5 players" on the box!
As soon as I thought of that, I knew immediately what I wanted
that gameboard to be like. For awhile now, I've been playing
Homeworlds on a really nice round felt "universe" (which
you can see a photo of in the Stove document). I'd figured out
a great way of storing the felt gameboard in one of our Icehouse
boxes in a way that will minimize fold "burn-in" and
I figured if we can get these made with a silk-screened starfield
for Homeworlds, we could get a 5-sided chessboard printed on
a big felt circle, too. And having assumed all that, I'm assuming
I could print on the back of the cloth circle, too, allowing
me to put a 3-sided chessboard on the other side! Way cool!
So, that's the idea. Of course, as with Volcano and Homeworlds,
we'll be needing yet another really nice full-color image for
the box top. (The place-holder artwork seen in the teaser image
above was done by me with colored pencils back in the 1980s.)
And it'll be great to have, since none of the other boxed sets
make use of the 100,000 year old game from Mars concept, yet
numerous games now make some sort of reference to the ancient
Mars theme. Also, it'll be great to have a product called the
Martian Chess set again, since we still get a lot of people asking
about the pyramids by saying "Do you sell Martian Chess?"
How nice it will be to be able to say "Yes!" instead
of "Well, we do, yes, but you see, you need Icehouse pieces
to play it, so you can either buy a Zendo set or an IceTowers
set or you can just buy a few stashes of pyramids a la carte..."
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