Ice Quandary, ver 0.1

[avram]

While looking over the big list of Icehouse games and 404 pages I was briefly intrigued by Ice Market, but put off by it’s unstructured nature and need for scoresheets. Yesterday, at NYRSF, I kicked around ideas with womzilla, that eventually gelled into something sort of like the old Milton Bradley game Quandary (sadly out of print, though I see there’s a card game that’s similar and much cheaper). But there’s nothing cheaper than stuff you’ve already got on hand, so I’m thinking about what I can do with the basic concept, Icehouse pieces, and an ordinary deck of cards.


As in Ice Market, assign card suits to Icehouse basic set piece colors:
Hearts = red
Clubs = green
Diamonds = blue
Spades = yellow
If I wind up not using some set of cards, like the face cards, I’ll probably place one of each next to the piece stashes as a reminder of which suit goes with which color.

Set up the four basic stashes, each stash in five stacks, bigs on top of mediums on top of smalls. (Might use fewer than five, possibly depending on number of players.)

Deal out cards. (Probably won’t use full deck. Ace through ten?)

Each player’s turn is simple:
1: Play one card, face-up, on the pile next to one stash of the matching color. (Each stash gets a pile.)
2: Take a piece from any one stash. You must take from the top of a stack, but you can take from any stack.

The game ends at the end of the turn when one stack is totally gone (small piece taken). (Maybe more than one stack? Or one or more stacks from at least two different colors?) Players score based on the pieces they’ve taken. Each piece is worth its point value plus the number on the top card of the card pile for that color.

So far this is a game that resembles Quandary, but I suspect the numbers don’t actually work. It shouldn’t take too long to play, so we can try it out at Games Club tomorrow.

Comments

Further reflection

[avram]

How about this: The game (or maybe just the round — in the original Quandary you played a number of rounds equal to the number of players, so everybody had a chance to go first) ends when the number of cards in a color’s pile is greater than the number of pieces left in that color’s stash.

Also, use ace through 10 plus jack, with jack as the top card meaning pieces of that color is worthless.

That gives us 11 cards of each suit (assuming all cards are dealt out). If we start with more then three stacks of each color, that gives us the possibility that we might run out of cards before the end of the game/round. Not a disaster — players can keep taking pieces, or we can add the condition of ending when the last card is played — but unaesthetic. Hm. Start with four stacks in each stash, I think.