Steve Jackson Games (SJGames) is a game company, founded in 1980 by Steve Jackson, that creates and publishes role-playing, board, and card games, and the gaming magazine Pyramid.
A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
Icehouse pieces, or Icehouse Pyramids, Treehouse pieces, Treehouse Pyramids and officially Looney Pyramids, are nestable and stackable pyramid-shaped gaming pieces and a game system. The game system was invented by Andrew Looney and John Cooper in 1987, originally for use in the game of Icehouse.
Andrew J. Looney, better known as Andy, is a game designer and computer programmer. He is also a photographer, a cartoonist, a video-blogger, and a marijuana-legalization advocate.
Rithmomachy is a highly complex, early European mathematical board game. The earliest known description of it dates from the eleventh century. A literal translation of the name is "The Battle of the Numbers". The game is much like chess, except most methods of capture depend on the numbers inscribed on each piece.
Zendo is a game of inductive logic designed by Kory Heath in which one player creates a rule for structures ("koans") to follow, and the other players try to discover it by building and studying various koans which follow or break the rule. The first student to correctly state the rule wins.
R.O.B. is a toy robot accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was launched in July 1985 as the Family Computer Robot in Japan, and October 1985 as R.O.B. in North America. Its short lifespan yielded only two games in the Robot Series: Gyromite and Stack-Up.
Martian Chess is an abstract strategy game for two or four players invented by Andrew Looney in 1999. It is played with Icehouse pyramids on a chessboard. To play with a number of players other than two or four, a non-Euclidean surface can be tiled to produce a board of the required size, allowing up to six players.
Fluxx is a card game, played with a specially designed deck published by Looney Labs. It is different from most other card games, in that the rules and the conditions for winning are altered throughout the game, via cards played by the players.
Chrononauts is a family of card games that simulates popular fictional ideas about how time travellers might alter history, drawing on sources like Back to the Future and the short stories collection Travels Through Time. The game was designed by Andrew Looney and is published by Looney Labs. The original game and a variant each won the Origins Award for Best Traditional Card Game.
Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.
Give Me the Brain is a discard-style card game designed by James Ernest and released in 1996 by Cheapass Games. In the game, players assume the role of zombies attempting to complete their tasks for the day at Friedey's, "the fast food restaurant of the damned", yet they only have one brain to share between them. The game inspired several sequels, all set at Friedey's.
Looney Labs, Inc. is a small game company based in College Park, Maryland, United States. It is named after its founders, Andrew Looney and Kristin Looney and is best known for creating the Fluxx line of card games. The company has three U.S. patents and eight Origins Awards.
Aquarius is a card game created by Andrew Looney and published by Looney Labs. The game play has some similarity to the game of dominoes. The card design and feel of the game is influenced by the Hippie movement and the art of Peter Max. The game has been released in two editions. The First Edition deck contained 5 Goal cards, 15 Action cards and 40 Element cards. The current Second Edition deck has 5 Goal cards, 18 Action cards, 55 Element cards and 1 "Wild" card.
This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and tabletop role-playing games published in 1996. For video games, see 1996 in video gaming.
Icebreaker is a 1995 strategy/action video game developed by Magnet Interactive Studios for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console. Despite the critical acclaim, the game did not sell well. Later, the game was also ported to Macintosh and PC, where it found a similar fate.
Once Upon a Time is a card game produced by Atlas Games, originally released in 1994 with a second edition published in 1995 and the current third edition in 2012. One object of Once Upon a Time is to tell a fairy tale as a group. While the story is developed by the whole group, the competitive aspect of the game is that each player has an individual goal of using all of the "Storytelling" cards he or she has in hand, and finishing the story with their own special "Happy Ever After" card. Only one player at a time is the current storyteller, giving him or her a chance to play their Storytelling cards, while the other players have a chance to "interrupt" the story and become the storyteller if, for example, the storyteller mentions something on one of the interrupting player's cards.
Khet is a chess-like abstract strategy board game using lasers that was formerly known as Deflexion. Players take turns moving Egyptian-themed pieces around the playing field, firing their low-powered laser diode after each move. Most of the pieces are mirrored on one or more sides, allowing the players to alter the path of the laser through the playing field. When a piece is struck by a laser on a non-mirrored side, it is eliminated from the game.
Mythos is an out-of-print collectible card game (CCG) published by Chaosium. It is based on the Cthulhu Mythos stories of the horror author H. P. Lovecraft, as well as on Chaosium's own Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.
Plateau is a two-player abstract strategy board game invented by Jim Albea.
