Poison Pot

Poison Pot is one of those sweet little 2-3-player strategy games with just the right balance between the kind of strategic depth that makes you want to play again and again, with the sheer, dumb luck you also need to keep you from taking it too personally when you lose.

In this well-made wooden game a turn consists of moving a piece that is already on the board, and then adding a new piece. Pieces come in three colors. Since the unplayed pieces are turned so that the color is on the bottom, you never know what color you'll be playing until you play it. A piece can be moved in any of six directions on the hexagonal board. The object is to position as many of your color pieces so that they are adjacent to each other.

There is another piece, the Poison Pot. The Poison in the Poison Pot, though not lethal, is just noxious enough to make any adjacent cluster worthless. Since the Poison Pot can be moved, a lot of the beginning strategy is aimed at trying to make sure the Poison Pot doesn't get moved near one of your clusters. Of course, as the board gets filled, strategies change (which helps keep the game so interesting). You might find yourself trying to break up your largest (and highest scoring) cluster, just to avoid poisonous proximity to the pot of pointlessness.

Though the game is definitely easy enough for an eight-year-old to play, with enough luck to make the eight-year-old want to keep playing, the strategic depth might be better appreciated by someone a bit older.

All in all, this game is just the kind of strategy game that the Major FUN Award was created for.

gameLab, Arcadia, Blix and Loop

Combine games research with the development of innovative digital games and people games, and you get gameLab. gameLab was co-founded by Eric Zimmerman and Peter Lee. Eric, whose articles appear in Brenda Laurel's Design Research, writes in his Play as Research: The Iterative Process: "In iterative design, there is a blending of designer and user, of creator and player. It is a process of design through the reinvention of play. Through iterative design, designers create systems and play with them. They become participants, but do so in order to critique their creations, to bend them, break them, and re-fashion them into something new. And in these procedures of investigation and experimentation, a special form of research takes place. The process of iteration, of design through play, is a way of discovering the answers to questions you didn’t even know were there."

Before you read Eric's fascinating, informed, and insightful description of the iterative design process (which I still believe, despite all the filmic complexity of multimediation, is the best and really only way to design a game), try a game of Loop. It will not only help you understand better what he's talking about, it will also help you understand why you want to read what he has to say.

Or, maybe start with a simpler game concept like Arcadia. Have you ever tried playing two arcade games at once? Just to keep from getting bored? And discovered how such a simple idea, like playing two at once, makes both games suddenly worth playing again? Almost as if you'd created a whole new game simply by combining a couple? Well, Arcadia combines four different arcade games, and paces each so that it's actually almost possible to play them all simultaneously, without losing your mind. Go ahead. Give it a try. I'd start out with the easiest version if I were you.

Then there's Blix, which reminds me a little of the first game I designed for the TRS-80, can you believe, and the Commodore Pet, and later the 64 and even the Atari VCS. It was called "Ricochet." Which is maybe why I'm not as objective about the elegant wonders of Blix as I can be the others. Which is also why gameLab has been inducted into the Major FUN Hall of Fame. Let me know if it's as fun as I think it is, will you?