PiecepackPlayset

Players 1-5
Length 15-90 minutes
Equipment Required standard piecepack
Designer RonHaleEvans
Version 0.2
Version Date 2020-12-27
License CC BY-SA 4.0 International

Description

Rules

1. Give a wooden piecepack to a small child or children.

2. Sit back and enjoy.

Rules

Mon, 15 Dec 2003

Rules

1. Give a wooden piecepack to a small child or children.

2. Sit back and enjoy.

I visited my friend Lion Kimbro yesterday and gave him a new Mesomorph piecepack as a holiday present. His 2-3/4-year-old daughter Sakura was present, and since her mother was away, she stuck close to Lion. As soon as Lion opened the piecepack, she dug her hands into the components and strewed them about.

She messed around with the components for a while, then built an 8x3 board of tiles. (Are there any piecepack games that use an 8x3 board?) On top of each tile, right in the middle, she placed either a coin or a pawn. (She may have used dice too.) I did not notice any ordering, except that she placed the pawns close together. The result was pretty.

Later, she took a coin from each suit and placed it suit-side-up on the corresponding suit icon on top of the piecepack box. (The diagram on the box is roughly the same as the logo shown above.) Pretty sharp for someone who's only 2.75! After she took off the coins, I placed a pawn of the appropriate colour on top of one of the box icons. Sakura picked the remaining pawns up and distributed them to the other icons. She didn't match the colours and I couldn't discern any other pattern in the way she placed them, but for all I know, the kid is a piecepack Mozart and invented a new system of colour correspondences.

Overall, it was a lot of fun watching Sakura play with the piecepack. She treated them as construction materials, like building blocks, rather than as a game or game system. Lion showed me some varnished wooden building blocks she likes to play with of approximately the same size and colour as the piecepack tiles. He also suggested that "unit blocks" (that is, various blocks made of unit cubes) would make an interesting game system.

If you do let a little kid play with your piecepack, watch them to make sure they don't eat the smaller components.

This episode of the Piecepack Ethologist has been brought to you by Ron Hale-Evans.

Followup

Delivery-date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 06:26:57 -0800
Subject: Sakura Piece-Pack Playset
From: Lion Kimbro <lion@speakeasy.org>

  Ron: Good news and bad news.
  Bad news first: My piecepack set is, well, rendered unplayable.
  One tile is now very, very, silver colored.
  Another one is makeup-red all over.
  Others have various other uniquely identifying patterns of
  God-knows-what feminine makeup-like substances on them.

  The good news.
  Sakura's FAVORITE TOY is now the Piecepack. She plays with
  it all the time, and always wants it.

  I keep coming to interesting game-like configurations on
  the ground, different every time I get home.

  Take care,
    Lion {:)}=

-- 
http://speakeasy.org/~lion/   LionKimbro@jabber.org   Seattle, WA

Sources

https://web.archive.org/web/2007/http://ron.ludism.org/annex/games/game_systems/piecepack_playset.html

https://web.archive.org/web/2007/http://ron.ludism.org/annex/games/game_systems/piecepack_playset2.html

License

Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International

Reviews

TK


CategoryGame GamesForChildrenCategory