Taxonomy of Piecepack Games [Long]

["Iain Cheyne" <groups@...>]

I recently read "The Oxford History of Board Games". It is an
excellent book and was written by David Parlett, the designer of Hare
and Tortoise. Everyone who is serious enough about games to subscribe
to this mailing list should definitely read it.

Coincidentally, I then came across the Taxonomy of Icehouse Games
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~guardcaptain/Taxonomy.html. It
attempts to categorise all the Icehouse games according to the scheme
used in The Oxford History of Board Games. It would be sensible to
refer this page before you read the rest of my post, as I have
plagiarised it extensively.

I decided to do the same with Piecepack games, as I wanted to get a
feel for all the Piecepack games out there and to see what
conclusions I could draw from the exercise. My categorisation is
online here: http://cheyne.net/piecepacktaxonomy.htm and
http://cheyne.net/piecepacktaxonomy.xls if you have Excel.
Parlett's categories have been slightly altered, to make the
results
more meaningful. I will try to get the spreadsheet into a more
readable format soon.

General observations:
· The proportion of themed games to abstracts is roughly equal.
· Most of Parlett's categories of games are covered, but
unevenly.
· There are relatively more race games and relatively fewer
displace games than I expected.
· Quite a few space game categories are underrepresented. There
are no traversal space games, for instance.
· There are four games about avoiding falling off melting ice.
· There is only one game about war.

I hope my list will be useful to players, when trying to find games
that are similar to their favourites, or to find games that are a bit
different from the crowd. I also hope it will be useful to designers
in discovering new types of games. With luck, the result will be an
increased variety of games available.

--
Iain