Re: Taxonomy of Piecepack Games [Long]

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

I have put this information onto the piecepack wiki
(http://jcd.ods.org/piecepack/TaxonomyOfPiecepackGames).

cheers

Iain

--- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, "Iain Cheyne" <groups@c...> wrote:
> 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