On Tue, 7 Mar 2006 12:05:59 -0500 (EST), "Ryan McGuire and Kerry Breitenbach" <kerry_and_ryan@xxxxxxx> wrote: >Different games lend themselves to demonstration in different settings. A >lot depends on the age of the event attendees and amount of time you have to >grab someone's attention. To a lesser extent, the amount of space you have >also matters. A Mensa meeting at your house or "Other Game Night" for your >college Dungeons and Dragons club will indicate different games than when >you have a single 3'x3' card table in the vender area at Origins. This is a good point, and one that I hadn't considered; the motivation behind the question, quite frankly, is the hope that the feedback I get from the question will trigger something in my mind so that any future new icehouse games I develop won't just be riffs on the same old games. So far, two of the three games I've come up with have been riffs on pachisi, and while I think pachisi is an underrated game, variations on a theme get old fast. > - Can be explained very quickly. > - Can be played a flexible number of people. 2 - 8 maybe? > - Have no turns or very little downtime between turns. This keeps people > from wandering away. > - Can be played in just a couple minutes. > - Are apropriate for children without too much adult guidance. Except for the last two, I think these are good. I don't think a game should be TOO short, and not all games should be children-appropriate; adults sometimes need adult levels of stimulation. Also, I'm interested in the qualities themselves, rather than which games exhibit them; as indicated, these are the qualities I want to strive to achieve in my own future creations. >If the scenario you have in mind is different, describe it. That way we can >help identify game properties that best fit the situation. For a scenario, I think the Game Night at the gaming club would be a good one; the game club has members ranging from teens (or just barely pre-teen - old enough to be considered responsible enough to babysit a younger sibling or the neighbor's child, or to spend an evening at a neighborhood community center without an adult chaperone) to seniors. >On a side note... >You say that you're not interested in the name and backstory marketing >issues, but those ARE qualities that can make a game more or less >attractive. Yes, but I want to focus on the game itself - good marketing can make a fundamentally decent game into a winner from the sales point of view, and can make the difference between success and failure for a fundamentally mediocre game, but I don't care HOW you market it, you're not going to turn a horrid game into a success. I'm looking for the qualities that a better-than-mediocre game has. -- Jeff Zeitlin icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My Icehouse Games on <http://www.icehousegames.org/wiki>: Pentamid, Pach-Ice-I, Par-Trees-i