Christopher Hickman writes: >> http://www.wunderland.com/icehouse/IcehouseStrategies.html >Ah, so The Shotgun is like playing Draw-Go in Magic. How annoying. ;) It's not, truly. The shotgun as described in "icehouse strategies" is actually a vast oversimplificiation of the shotgun as it's usually played (including by Jake, IMEX). In essence -- The snowball is a highly aggressive strategy -- you do your defense at the beginning of the game, getting at least one unbreakable fortress. Then you start picking off defenders -- you don't have to worry about playing them (fortress!), so you can attack anything people put down without fear of anything aside from restructuring. An advanced snowball will also try to lock in attacks as much as possible to avoid being restrucutred -- but if need be, simply making sure nobody gets any prisoners will do nicely. The shotgun is a highly defensive strategy -- you play most of your large/medium pieces as defenders in free space, thus making it both expensive (people need to devote a lot of pieces to do it) and risky (you could restructre them all) for people to attack you. However, part and parcel of this is preventing people from getting a fortress--both because this makes it easier for you to get a lot of prisoners on an icehouse call and because players without a fortress cannot usually afford to devote the number of attackers needed to substantially hurt you. Basically, the snowball strategy secures its offense by locking down defensivley, whereas the shotgun secures its defense by playing offensivley. This ignores, of course, the "paranoid shotgun" which is more of what I usually play -- a mix of snowball fortressing, solidly locked in attacks, building the snowball around opposing shotgunners, and shotgunning myself when I think I can get (or have) a good-sized prisoner. -- Joshua Kronengold (mneme@(io.com, labcats.org)) |\ _,,,--,,_ ,) --^-- "Did you know, if you increment enough, you /,`.-'`' -, ;-;;' /\\ get an extra digit?" "I knew," weeps Six. |,4- ) )-,_ ) /\ /-\\\ "We knew. But we had forgotten." '---''(_/--' (_/-'