last night i introduced some new friends to the pyramids with Treehouse.
We all enjoyed the games, we played 4 rounds with 4 players each. We
had as much fun deciding what to do on our turn as we had trying to
influence each other on their move.
At first when we began playing we all thought that the game was going to
take forever, however after we played the first round we decided that
more playings wouldn't take much time at all. I'd say a round can take
between 5 and 10 minutes once you have all theh moves figured out.
Which takes me to Kristins questions.
* can you figure it out from JUST the rules on the
tube
Now granted 2 of us were fimiliar with icehouse games in general, and
the other two had no experience with icehouse pyramids at all.
After reading the rules for the first time we were definately unsure.
* if not - what isn't working for you - how might
we fix it?
i did explain the term tree, but don't think it was necessary, as much
as just talking about icehouse in general. the alignment statement took
a bit of discussion to flesh out, but we did it, I don't think this is
an issue, but could probably be clarified. I don't have any suggestions
off the top of my head regarding that though.
The line regarding gaps forming and closing was mostly overlooked, so I
think it should probably be bolded or something, it might have helped us
a a bit.
I'll go through each action now:
1- Tip was probably the most clear rule of them all. (maybe here you
re-emphasise the gaps and closing rule)
2-Swap made sense to us as well, however seeing some of the swaps we
made, definately made us question if we were playing it correctly.
questsion, is a swap ever able to be made in the house? we played that
if you could take the action on the house only if you couldn't take the
action on your pieces. therefore, swapping is always able to be done on
your own pieces, never the house. Target trio is confusing in this rule
if that's the case.
3-Digging made sense to me, the only question being with the term
beyond, especially being on the other side of the paarentheses. Here
your essentially building a new stack either of 2 or three pieces, or
uprighting a sideways piece.
4-Hop. Similar to swapping, in that this always happens in your pieces
unless all of your pieces are laying down. uncapped/upright was not
confusing to us at all, or the new icehouse folks, it seems pretty self
explanatory to me. The only question we had here was if you roll a hop
with your initial tree. We played it that you'd take the top piece off
and place it in the line somewehere.
5-On Aim we sort of forgot that this meeant that you could upright a
piece as well, once again careful reading resolves this problem, as well
as most other questions, and with a rule-set of this size is probably
best to anyway, but in our eagerness to play forgot that last word.
I know I didn't make many suggestions for fixing it, but explained how
we ended up playing. Hopefully this report is helpful.
and once you actually know how to play...
* do you like the game? do your non pyramid fan
friends like it?
we all enjoyed the game. We didn't play with non-fans, so much as folks
with no pyramid experience. They enjoyed it as well. I sent them the
list of questions asking them to reply with their experience as well,
hopefully they do. I'm pretty sure that they'll buy it.