Taken from the IceList: Icehouse Games's original Master Piecenik's reminiscences about the early sets.
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 1998 23:47:30 -0400
From: Charles Dickson
To: icehouse@HUMANS-ONLY.andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Feats of Clay -or- Shameless Reminiscence on The Early Days
Kristin wrote:
KL> Ah, the memories. My first clay set was super sculpy. I remember that
KL> night well... this guy Andy Looney, a co-worker of mine at NASA, had set up
KL> this playtest with me and some of my friends. He and his friend John
KL> Cooper had this game called Icehouse they had invented, and they had
KL> finally gotten the rules written down, and they wanted a group of friends
KL> who had never seen the game before to sit down and try to play from the
KL> written rules while he stood around in the background in a lab coat taking
KL> notes on a clipboard. It was an awesome game, and a very good time...
KL>
Ahem:
I can't recall seeing the original playtest mentioned in the previous
thread, but my recollection is that we all pretty quickly realized the
advantage of building fortresses against the edge of the table or
stashpads, greatly surprising Andy and John, who had for some reason
only been playing in the middle of the table during their development
process. I believe that these qualify as the bona-fide first
"cheezeballs", and that photographic evidence from the first playtest
exists to this effect.
Anyhow, after Kristin made her Sculpey pieces, she quickly turned me on
to the material, and I made a set; we took both to Evecon that year so
see how it would catch on with the various gamers there. Sometime
later, I showed the game to my friend Dave Hendrikson. He and I at the
time were enrolled in what is probably a pretty rare class on college
campuses today, Industrial Technology, which is to say "shop". One
winter night that year Dave and I cut a bunch of wood pieces on a table
saw (yes) in his dad's garage, thus creating the first wood pieces.
These rather rough and imprecise creations were used the next day as our
project in wet-sand casting of aluminum. Thus metal pieces occurred
very early in the history of Icehouse materials experimentation, and
have sadly never been generated in large quantity since.
However, due to our amateur proficiency with the process, badly cast
pieces outnumbered the keepers, and so we ended up with only about
enough to make two sets. In the spring, Dave took a trip out to Reed
Platics, returning with a batch of rubber molding compound and a
1-gallon can of polyester resin. Working in the 7th floor lounge of our
dorm, stinking out everybody else who by rights should have tossed us
out a window, we cast molds for the first plastic pieces using the metal
pieces as the originals. I have a great photo showing the history of
icehouse piece development at that time, starting with some pieces from
my Sculpey set, some of the original wood pieces, some metal pieces, and
the first plastic pieces.
That year I took everything I had to Castlecon to try to interest more
strangers in the game. Of the pieces I possessed aside from the
sculpey, I had just enough to make a two player set; a metal set and a
plastic set. Of the plastic pieces, I still had not cast enough to have
a full set all the same color; the first plastic set was a mixture of
clear and blue! Late at night, I set these opposing sets up on a
gorgeous glass coffee table by a couch, waiting on the couch for
passers-by to stop and play the opposing set.
But that was just the beginning.
Number 12
Last updated 1999/01/22
