Andy Looney

Last updated
Andrew J. Looney
Born (1963-11-05) November 5, 1963 (age 58)
NationalityAmerican
Occupationgame designer
EmployerLooney Labs
Known forGame Designer, Eagle Scout
TitleChief creative officer
Spouse(s)Kristin (Wunderlich)
Website wunderland.com

Andrew J. Looney (born November 5, 1963) is a game designer and computer programmer. He is also a photographer, a cartoonist, a video-blogger, and a marijuana-legalization advocate. [1]

Contents

Andrew and Kristin Looney together founded the games company Looney Labs, [2] where Andrew is the chief creative officer. [1] Looney Labs has published most of his game designs, such as Fluxx , Chrononauts , and the Icehouse game system. [3] His other game designs include Aquarius , Nanofictionary , IceTowers , Treehouse , and Martian Coasters . [1]

Biography

Andrew Looney as a youth became an Eagle Scout. [1] He entered the University of Maryland at College Park in 1981 as a freshman with an undecided major between English and computer science. He eventually selected computer science. [4]

He and Kristin, his future spouse, met in 1986 when he started at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as a software programmer. Kristin was a computer engineer designing computer chips. [5] Keeping English as a side interest, he wrote "The Empty City", a science-fiction short story. Wanting a game in the story but feeling a card game as too boring, he created a fictional game, Icehouse, that used pyramids. Readers of the short story requested to learn how to play the game. Thus actual rules were invented for Icehouse, then plastic pyramid pieces were made to play the game. [4] The pieces were made from resin in his apartment, which upset the landlord due to the smell. This led them to launch their own game company to sell the Icehouse game. [5] After several years, Looney shut down Icehouse Games, Inc. [4] [6]

He and his wife launched Looney Laboratories in 1996 as a part-time home based design company. Andrew soon designed the Fluxx card game. [4] He then went on to a brief career as a game programmer at Magnet Interactive Studios, where he created that company's only entry to the market, Icebreaker.[ citation needed ] Aquarius was Andy's and Labs' next game, launched in 1998. [4] In 2002, a few years after Kristin went full-time with their company, Andy followed. [5]

Patents & awards

Andy has three U.S. patents and five Origins Awards. [2]

Looney holds patents on the game mechanics for:

Looney has won the following game design awards:

Works

Related Research Articles

Icehouse pieces Pyramid shaped gaming pieces

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.

<i>Zendo</i> (game)

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.

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 Looney Labs card game

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 Interactive fiction programmer and writer

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.

David Braben

David John Braben is a British video game developer and designer, founder and CEO of Frontier Developments, co-creator of the Elite series of space trading video games, first published in 1984. He is also a co-founder of and works as a trustee for the Raspberry Pi Foundation which in 2012 launched a low-cost computer for education.

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.

Cosmic Coasters is a board game designed by Andrew Looney and published by Looney Labs. In 2002, Cosmic Coasters won the Origins Award for Best Abstract Board Game of 2001.

This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and tabletop role-playing games published in 2001. For video games, see 2001 in video gaming.

This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and tabletop role-playing games published in 1991. For video games, see 1991 in video gaming.

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.

This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and tabletop role-playing games published in 2005. For video games, see 2005 in video gaming.

Set Enterprises, Inc. was a game publishing company based in Fountain Hills, Arizona, USA. Two of its games won in the annual Mind Games competition American Mensa.

<i>Once Upon a Time</i> (game) Card game

Once Upon a Time is a card game produced by Atlas Games, originally released in 1994 with a second edition published in December 1995 and the current third edition in October 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 they have in hand, and finishing the story with their own special "Happy Ever After" card.

Treehouse (game) Board game

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.

Zombie Fluxx is a 2007 card game published by Looney Labs.

Icehouse: The Martian Chess Set is a 1999 board game published by Looney Labs.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Looney, Andrew (2007). "Cosmic Wimpout". In Lowder, James (ed.). Hobby Games: The 100 Best . Green Ronin Publishing. pp. 69–72. ISBN   978-1-932442-96-0.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 West, Susan (October 2005). "The Looney Labs Experiment". GAMES magazine . Games Publications.
  3. ↑ Salen, Katie; Zimmerman, Eric (2003). Rules of Play . Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. p. 546. ISBN   978-0-262-24045-1.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Barnes, Denise (August 27, 1998). "The Looneys devise a game plan". Washington Times. Retrieved June 18, 2015.
  5. 1 2 3 Ford, C. Benjamin (November 22, 2002). "Looneys working through the serious business of fun". The Gazette. Post Community Media, LLC. Archived from the original on June 17, 2015. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  6. ↑ "History of Icehouse Games, 1987-1998". wunderland.com. Looney Labs. 1998. Retrieved June 22, 2015.
  7. 1 2 3 "Parents' Choice Award-Winning Company: Looney Labs". Parents-Choice.org. Parents' Choice Foundation. Retrieved June 24, 2015.
  8. ↑ "2007 Origins Award Winners". ICv2. July 9, 2007. Retrieved June 8, 2015.
  9. ↑ 34th Annual Origins Award Winners Archived 2008-04-18 at the Wayback Machine
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