[Icehouse] IGDC Winter 2008 is ready for announcement tomorrow!

[kerry_and_ryan at att.net]

Brian Campbell:
> Now, I haven't  
> actually looked at the rules of whatever the game in question are (is  
> there an actual game, or is this all hypthetical? I haven't been  
> following the discussion closely enough to have picked that up), but I  
> really think that if a game makes good use of two Treehouse stashes,  
> it should be allowed.

I'll offer up my own Ice Dao (http://home.att.net/~kerry_and_ryan/IceDao.html) as a strawman.  It's a two-player game where each player uses one large, one medium and two smalls.  The easiest way would be to have all of a player's pieces be the same color, and that requires 2 Treehouse sets to get the requisite number of smalls (and that's how the rules are written).  But the game could easily be played with a single Treehouse set as red&yellow versus blue&green.

As I think I've mentioned before, I wouldn't mind seeing such an entry in this competition, but I would rate it at least a little lower just because it isn't "solidly" a 2HOUSE game.  I could see other judges rating it as either perfectly 2HOUSE or perfectly non-2HOUSE.  It's a judgment call -- that's what judges are for.

Discuss.

> but if there is any disagreement at  
> all (and there's certainly disagreement here), just leave it up to the  
> judges to decide. 

That echoes my thoughts.

> If just  
> reading the rules you think "meh, I can't see how that game would be  
> any good", well, that game probably needs some work. Of course, judges  
> should always have at least read the rules of any game they rank, but  
> I don't think that playing a game should be a requirement for ranking  
> it.

I agree with this as well.  Another criterion a judge might use during this initial weeding-out is whether _that_particular_judge_ considers each game "a 2HOUSE game."  

Ryan