Genesis, Cloning, Possibilities

[jdroscha@...]

--- In piecepack@y..., Doug Orleans <dougo@c...> wrote:
> 
> I'm curious about the genesis of the piecepack-- was there a
> particular game idea that led to its design, or did you just put
> together several different commonly-used piece ideas? 

   The piecepack was designed conceptually and is intended, somewhat, 
as an experiment.  I had no games in mind when I built the piecepack, 
and I did not design the first piecepack game (which was the manual 
dexterity game Soccer, by the by) until after the piecepack was 
finalized and I had built the first prototype.  The components and 
markings were created to give designers many elements used in common 
game mechanisms in one convenient package.
   As far as I know, no other game set was designed in this way.  The 
Icehouse set, for example, was created specifically to play Icehouse 
and was later found to be suitable for the development of several 
other games.  But because of the way it came into being, it lacks 
some common gaming elements such as a board, a convenient randomizer, 
and convenient information hiding.

> The rules I've
> looked at seem mostly to be adaptations of other games to the
> piecepack set, and don't use all the features of the set

   This is an interesting perception, as none of the existing 
piecepack games (that I can think of) are adaptions of other games 
(unless you count the real-life equivalents of Soccer and Baseball).  
Some of the games certainly resemble other games in their genre; 
MotoX, for example, necessarily has similarities to other racing 
games.  But most of the piecepack games contain mechanics that, at 
least to me, are brand new.  In MotoX, for instance, rolling a number 
of dice equal to your position in the race (1 die if you are in 
first, 2 dice if in second, etc.) then selecting which value to use 
for movement was new to me when I wrote it.  I can't say there are no 
other games out there with that mechanic, but if there are, I don't 
know about them.  I personally have never seen anything remotely 
similar to the very three-dimensional Hanging Gardens (Mik Svellov's 
favorite of the bunch so far).
   If the games all feel like clones to people, I certainly will not 
argue against that notion, but I wish to make it clear that none of 
the piecepack games (that I have) written so far were intended mimic 
existing games.

> a "killer
> app" game would probably need to have some fairly unique mechanisms
> that take advantage of all the important aspects of the piecepack 
set.
> Although it may not even be clear what all those aspects are yet...

   Correct... none of the games written so far use every aspect of 
the piecepack.  Many of them do not even use all of the components.  
I am also excited by the possibilities of combining the piecepack 
with other various game sets.  In an article I wrote for Grampa 
Barmo's Discount Gaming Magazine, I briefly touched on ideas such as 
playing chess on a board of any shape (piecepack + chess), playing 
scrabble on a board of any shape (piecepack + Scrabble), combining 2 
or more piecepacks, or combining a piecepack with an Icehouse set.  
Jim Doherty has already combined a piecepack with the standard deck 
of playing cards to create Baseball.

Game On,
James