Re: [piecepack] Giant piecepacks

["Mike Schoessow" <mikeschoessow@...>]

Sorry for the late reply. I've been out of touch for a while. I love the idea of giant piecepacks, say twice as big as standard. There are a number of piecepack games which would feel much more impressive and substantial with bigger tablueas. Also, 4x4 games played with piecepack bits wouldn't seem so trivially small :-)

My wife, my son, my brother Steve, and I have recently gotten back from a two week trip to Costa Rica and, while we were there I purchased several *very nice* boxed hand made wooden domino and dice sets. One of the domino sets is half-size, which gave me the idea of coming up with a half-size piecepack for use when traveling (which I actually do little of but, hey, it's still a cool idea I think). Steve and I have designed a number of games utilizing a combination of dominoes and piecepack so we think about this. We didn't actually play that many games while there since Costa Rica turned out to be such an extremely great place to be and there were plenty of other activities.

But we did play a few games some evenings.

We got in a game of New City and we tried Hanging Gardens but even among all the players we couldn't completely decipher the rules to Hanging Gardens. There are definitely logical inconsistancies in the rules as posted at piecepack.org. (but keep in mind that two of us are engineers so we tend to read rules literally and grammatically). We ended up playing quite a bit of piecepack solitaire including One Man Thrag, Piece Packing Pirates, and Cardinal's Guards. My brother Steve got my 13-year-old son Arik particularly engaged in this some evenings, with the two of them playing as a "team". They played two games of PPP, the first of which was a disaster but the second of which they did very well indeed at. Arik became quickly enamored of One Man Thrag and played it probably 6-8 times, usually dojng quite well and winning at least half the time. The thing that amazed Steve and me though was how good Arik was at Cardinal's Guards, winning it two times out of three, playing by himself, and then winning again after Steve told him he had to play using the more difficult variant (I've never won myself although I've come very close multiple times). 

Steve and I used the piecepack to try out some other games that I had designed (and found flaws, sigh), and we also tried a reconstructed ancient Roman abstract strategy game, Latranculi, using piecepack tiles to make the 8x8 board and using pennies for pieces.

We also took along and played some other compact commercial games including Canal Grande, Agora, and Havok:The Hundred Years War (which we both really liked), and I taught Steve how to play my favorite 2-player trick-taking game, Le Truc.

I have to conclude though by mentioning that Costa Rica was incredibly great; super friendly people, incredible scenery and country, fantastic climate, and everything costs about half of what it costs here.

_Mike












  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ron Hale-Evans 
  To: piecepack@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 1:58 AM
  Subject: [piecepack] Giant piecepacks


  Hey, the Icehouse folks build giant Icehouse sets to play with, right?

  http://icehousegames.org/wiki/?title=Giant_pieces

  Why not giant piecepacks?

  Let's assume we want to build them to the same scale in case we want
  to play a giant game of Alien City or something. Giant Icehouse pieces
  are 8x. The Piecepack Anatomy page
  <http://www.piecepack.org/Anatomy.html> reads,

  "As a point of reference, (not a requirement), the Mesomorph piecepack
  pieces are the following dimensions: tiles are 2" x 2" x 1/4", coins
  are 3/4" diameter x 1/8", dice are 1/2" x 1/2" x 1/2", and pawns are
  5/8" diameter x 1-1/8" tall."

  That means a Giant Piecepack would have the following dimensions:

  Tiles: 16" x 16" x 2"
  Coins: 6" x 1"
  Dice: 4" x 4" x 4"
  Pawns: 5" diam x 9" tall

  I'm planning to attend Penguicon <http://penguicon.org/> in April.
  Clark, do you think one of these sets would interest other attendees?

  Ron

  -- 
  Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... ... http://ron.ludism.org/
  Mind Performance Hacks book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindperfhks/
  Center for Ludic Synergy: http://www.ludism.org/
  (revilous life proving aye the death of ronaldses when winpower wine has
  bucked the kick on poor won man)