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 2007
was a very good year for me in my career as a Game
Designer. My previous works continued to gain both commercial
and critical success, with Fluxx selling its 400,000th copy,
Treehouse
receiving the Origins Award for Best Board Game of the Year,
and Icebreaker
2 finally getting published for the 3DO. More importantly,
over the course of the year I designed six more games:
It's interesting to see how long some games take to finish
-- and how others can get done incredibly quickly. Black ICE
took just a few weeks to go from idea to printed rulebook, and
I posted the complete rules for Twin Win just 15 days after inventing
it. Other games, like Just
Desserts, have been in the works literally for years and
yet are still not close to becoming a finished product. (Then
there are games like Nanofictionary,
which we published over
5 years ago but which I'm now in the
process of redesigning. But that's another story.)
Anyway, it was almost exactly a year ago that I first started
tinkering up ideas for a game using the new Stonehenge game system,
and as always it's really cool to finally have a copy of finished
game in my hand. But it's a little different this time, since
Looney Labs isn't the publisher of this game.
The Stonehenge "Anthology Board Game" is a system
much like my own Icehouse
game system: a collection of attractive game components you
can play a bunch of totally different abstract board games with.
Unlike Icehouse, the system includes both a board and a much
more concrete theme, but the components are similarly flexible
and inspirational.
 The
basic set includes parts for 5 players and rules for 5 games
designed by 5 "World-Class" Game Designers. The expansion
set, called Nocturne, includes parts for 2 more players along
with rules for another 4 games. Obviously, it was quite an honor
to have been commissioned to design something for this new system,
and I'm very pleased with the game I was able to create for it.
The perfect theme for my game became obvious as soon as I
started studying the history of Stonehenge for this purpose.
With 5000+ years of historical events to draw from, the setting
provides plenty of options even without invoking alien spacecraft,
time travel, or an army of ghosts. Richard Garfield did a game
about the original construction of Stonehenge, Bruno Faidutti
wrote one about politics and elections between tribes of ancient
druids, and James Ernest used the setting of the Dark Ages for
a game in which blocks from Stonehenge are being auctioned off
and removed for use as building materials.
Anyway, my game is one of the most historically accurate,
since it was inspired by a series of events we know really happened
at the ancient monument: the Free Festivals of the 1970s! Since
everyone knows I'm an unabashed hippie, I couldn't resist making
my game just a big counterculture party. And it's fun, too! It's
vaguely like Chrononauts
in that there's a lot going on, your goals can change, and there
are three different ways to win. (I'm also pretty sure I'll be
able to play it during Andy
vs. Everybody, but I haven't actually tried that yet.)
Nocturne includes three other games by yet more big-name designers:
Sun & Moon, by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, The Stargate, by
Serge Laget & Bruno Cathala, and Battle of the Beanfield,
by Mike Selinker. The last of these is a solitaire game that
was an unexpected addition to the set. Mike was inspired to create
it after reading in the introduction to my game about the massacre
that brought the Free Festivals to an end, and it proved to be
so much fun they decided to include it as a bonus game.
Like most of the products listed on the new Who
Else Has Gone Looney? page, the Nocturne expansion (and Stonehenge
itself, since it's required for Nocturne) is for sale at our
webstore. Even though we aren't the publishers, we've arranged
with these other companies to be able to sell these items too,
so that LooneyLabs.com.
can provide you with one-stop shopping for all your Looney needs.
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