Thanks for all the feedback. I *will* post this to the Icehouse Wiki, but I just wanted to get some quick feedback here first. > Third, I see one big drawback, that you might want to > consider: a full grey stash is only available to folks > who have Carrots to spend. Further, they might go the > way of the dodo someday. SO... would the game still > work if, say, one used Clears instead of Grey? No, The use of the grey/gray stash is a conscious decision. It isn't too hard to earn a point and I wanted to actively encourage more players to join the Mad Lab Rabbit ranks. However, I *could* re-order the shields so that the two-pip one is the disposable shield and the 1-pip does the damage. This would mean that you could use the clear set for the primary shield, the white or black for that ship's secondary shield, and not know the outcome of a battle until ships start taking damage. I think, though, I'd rather just require grey pyramids -- after all, I don't need it to be a commercial success :) > Fourth, about that chart: is there a way you might make > it more intuitive to understand the underlying "pattern" > or methodology? As it it now, I feel like I'd need it > to reference during play, which is sort of a drag. That's > the sort of thing folks might be able to help with, on > the Talk page of the wiki. Yeah. There was a late change to that table (in order to reduce the frequency of draws) that makes it less obvious. All the white and black combat used to be a draw if the secondary shields were the same. During what little playtesting I have done it's obvious that the major hurdle for this game will be minimising draws. Actually *thinking* about that combat table may provide a solution. I'll have another go when I'm off this cold medication. ;) > However, on first glance I notice that the Destroyers are color-bound. > This makes them worth somewhat less than the Frigates, which is slightly > unintuitive given the pip values. More seriously, it makes draws > possible, if two people have opposite-colored Frigates. By traveling on the diagonal, they effectively travel twice as fast as the Frigates. But I suppose that Frigates are faster, but Destroyers are more powerful... Perhaps whenever two ships of the same colour are side-by-side they could swap places as a move. I may take a leaf from the Looney Labs book and completely re-write the victory conditions. For example; the backstory I wrote talks about fighting over resources. Perhaps a pile of pyramids could be placed in the center of the board and the winner is the first player to collect more than half. Or one pyramid and the winner is the first to get it back to their corner. > First, I like the look of the game, and the premise > of taking advantage of opaque pieces is a good one. > I have thought about that, from time to time, and > about all I could come up with was a game similar > to Mastermind... which was pretty dull, actually. Yeah, for a while that's all I could come up with too. Even so, I would have written up something if I could have made the way of signaling correct and partially correct guesses less clumsy. Thanks again, Chris J.