Wow...lots of stuff to respond to! I guess I'll try to break it down. I do find the discussion of Piece requirements quite relevant, but certainly not discussion of how pieces are sold (that has been hashed out well enough recently). 1. I had originally envisioned this as being playable by people who had 5 Treehouse sets and a Grey stash. I can certainly see now that this might not be the case for everyone and am brainstorming a possible solution. Certainly utilizing the medium opaques as well as "minor veins" might be a possibility, and might even add to the strategy potential. 2. I am also beginning to think that the overall dynamic right now might be too heavily geared towards pure randomness. I had intended in my initial thinking for the game to have somewhat of a memory component. I am now considering that maybe the game should be played with a smaller number of veins total (perhaps 5 in static positions or something like that) and that keeping track of what pieces have been mined already and thus what might be available becomes a component..I don't know, still working on that. 3. For David's procedural question, yes you would be able to look at a vein if you are loaded down, you just wouldn't be able to mine anything else until you drop diamonds. I appreciate the feedback so far! I do believe that it is good advice to strive to achieve a design that can be played with a 5house set so that might become a goal now. If anybody else has any comments on the gameplay so far I would love to continue to hear them. Thanks all! On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:23 PM, <karlvonl@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Joshua Kronengold writes: >>Also, MegaVolcano (MEGA VOLCANO!) playes with 8 stashes; this is far >>from the only game with extreme requirements. > > Yeah, but Mega Volcano exists not because the design of Volcano by its very nature requires so many colors, but because they thought it would be a neat idea to expand Volcano to use all of the colors that existed at the time (9). Now that there are 12 colors in existence, you could expand it to a 7x7 board and call it "Giga Volcano". But that wouldn't mean that the core concept of Volcano requires so many colors. > > I would guess that most viable Icehouse game concepts can be implemented with 5 mono stashes, and that most games that require an extreme number of colors were designed specifically to take advantage of the designer's extensive collection. > _______________________________________________ > Icehouse mailing list > Icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.looneylabs.com/mailman/listinfo/icehouse > -- Sam Zitin Director of Information Management Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity Office:317-876-1913 Cell: 317-710-0925