Mao is a card game of the shedding family. The aim is to get rid of all of the cards in hand without breaking certain unspoken rules which tend to vary by venue. The game is from a subset of the Stops family and is similar in structure to the card game Uno or Crazy Eights.
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 is a game designer and computer programmer. He is also a photographer, a cartoonist, a video-blogger, and a marijuana-legalization advocate.
Eleusis is a shedding-type card game where one player chooses a secret rule to determine which cards can be played on top of others, and the other players attempt to determine the rule using inductive logic.
Pyramid is the collective name of a series of American television game shows that has aired several versions domestically and internationally. The original series, The $10,000 Pyramid, debuted on March 26, 1973, and spawned seven subsequent Pyramid series. Most later series featured a full title format matching the original series, with the title reflecting an increasing top prize. The game features two contestants, each paired with a celebrity. Contestants attempt to guess a series of words or phrases based on descriptions given to them by their teammates. The title refers to the show's pyramid-shaped gameboard, featuring six categories arranged in a triangular fashion. The various Pyramid series have won a total of nine Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Game Show, second only to Jeopardy!, which has won 13.
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.
Robert Abbott was an American game inventor, sometimes referred to by fans as "The Official Grand Old Man of Card Games". Though early in his life he worked as a computer programmer with the IBM 360 assembly language, he began designing games in the 1950s.
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.
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.
Get the Picture is an American children's game show that aired from March 18 to December 6, 1991, on Nickelodeon. Hosted by Mike O'Malley, the show features two teams answering questions and playing games for the opportunity to guess a hidden picture on a giant screen made up of 16 smaller screens. The show was taped at Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. The program's theme music and game music was composed by Dan Vitco and Mark Schultz, and produced by Schultz. Its tagline is The Great Frame Game.
Penultima is a game of inductive logic, played on a chess board. It was invented by Michael Greene and Adam Chalcraft in Cambridge in 1994. The game is derived from the chess variant Ultima, and played with a standard chess board and pieces, each piece having different movement and capture rules from standard chess. In a manner similar to the game Mao, which was a popular game in Cambridge at that time, the rules for each piece vary from game to game, and are initially kept secret from the players. Penultima is similar in style to Eleusis, Zendo and Mao. The name of the game is a pun on "penultimate", and "Ultima", the name of the chess variant.
Labyrinth is a board game for two to four players, published by Ravensburger in 1986.
Carnelli is a parlor game of subsequent text continuation. It was created by Jan Carnell, a member of the Metropolitan Washington chapter of Mensa. This game has been popular at Mensa gatherings for years, and has turned up at science fiction conventions as well. It can be called a "title association" game, like "word association" only using titles, such as those of a book, play, movie, or song.
Ingenious is the English name for Einfach Genial, a German abstract strategy board game designed by Reiner Knizia under commission from Sophisticated Games and published in 2004 by Kosmos. Across most of Europe it is titled as the local translation of Ingenious or Simply Ingenious, the notable exception being Mensa Connections in the UK.
Treehouse is a game in which players try to get their configuration of Icehouse pieces to match the central configuration, shared by all players. The rolling of the special "Treehouse Die" tells the player what kind of move to make to change his own or the central configuration, and then he does so to best move towards the goal.
A guess is a swift conclusion drawn from data directly at hand, and held as probable or tentative, while the person making the guess admittedly lacks material for a greater degree of certainty. A guess is also an unstable answer, as it is "always putative, fallible, open to further revision and interpretation, and validated against the horizon of possible meanings by showing that one interpretation is more probable than another in light of what we already know". In many of its uses, "the meaning of guessing is assumed as implicitly understood", and the term is therefore often used without being meticulously defined. Guessing may combine elements of deduction, induction, abduction, and the purely random selection of one choice from a set of given options. Guessing may also involve the intuition of the guesser, who may have a "gut feeling" about which answer is correct without necessarily being able to articulate a reason for having this feeling.
Second Inquisition is a tabletop role-playing game supplement released on March 16, 2022, by Renegade Game Studios, for use with the game Vampire: The Masquerade, and is part of the larger World of Darkness series. It describes globally connected groups of vampire hunters in the game's setting, and how to create antagonists belonging to them for one's game campaigns.
