leah blogs

February 2005

04feb2005 · Icehouse

shapr of #darcs introduced me to Icehouse, a “generic game”, i.e. one you can play with many—and totally different—rules.

Icehouses essentially are stackable plasic pyramids in different colors and three sizes. I’ve been reading about some popular games people play with it, for example:

  • IceTowers is a kind of distributed Towers Of Hanoi where you must try to make as many as possible towers with your color on the top, but you only can stack smaller pieces on larger ones.

    The fun thing in the game is probably that everyone is allowed to play at the same time, no waiting till it’s your turn anymore. :-)

  • Zendo is a kind of Mastermind on steroids where you need to figure the masters composition of Icehouses.

  • The original Icehouse, which looks to me like a kind of chess, except there is no board. ;-) And like with IceTowers, there are no turns. Also, you usually aren’t allowed to move your pieces. OK, it’s probably totally unlike chess. *g* Maybe more like Domino.

  • Volcano, which reminds me of some chain-reaction games.

These plastic pieces, although very simple, seem to be extremely flexible in gameplay. Heck, I want a few stashes of them… but where do I get those in Germany?

NP: Elliott Smith—Coming Up Roses

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