Fight board-game hegemony!

by Crackmonkey

2001-11-04 16:47:48

Software Jihad

52 cards and a copy of Hoyle can keep a handful of sex-starved shipmates docile for days on end before they degenerate to strip poker. With that in mind, the intellectual freedom posse give you the "piecepack" in the hopes that it will do for board games what the standard 52-card deck does for card games.

But it is not without some struggle! The current reigning champion in this arena is Looney Labs with their incredibly popular Icehouse Martian Chess Set These sixty colored pyramids (four colors, three sizes, five pieces per color/size combination) have been combined to make countless new games.

But the original game these pieces were designed for was granted a patent, threatening freely redistributable implementations of the game!

Fortunately for right-thinking individuals the world over, one stalwart Icehouse game developer has rebelled, and is designing his own freely redistributable and modifiable game set specification. As one fellow Icegamer explained:

...I have extensive notes from playtesting that I intend to incorporate into the next version of the IceGammon rules, but may not get around to it for a while, as I have been focusing less on Icehouse games and more on piecepack games <http://www.piecepack.org/>, as the Icehouse specification is patented, whereas the piecepack specification is in the public domain, and I am more interested in working with a free game system (free as in free speech, not free beer; see <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/>). Despite the currently small number of piecepack games, as opposed to the relatively large number of Icehouse games, more and more piecepack games are being released (one guy is writing a book of 100 piecepack games), and my belief is that the piecepack is at the cutting edge of game system development.

The good news on both fronts is that the Icehouse patent was never renewed after its initial 8-year period, so the piecepack may in future include Icehouse pyramids. Beaujolais to free software embracing and encorporating formerly proprietary technology! Our pointy-pyramid technology will bring pointy pyramids to those who could not otherwise participate in novel game development, and produce a community of like-minded game h@x0rz who will one day become the most sought-after personnel at board-game startups in the great boom years of 201x! THE IPOS WILL BE INCONCIEVABLE!

Check it out yourself

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