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Looney Labs

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Looney Labs is a small game company based in College Park, Maryland, USA. It is named after its founders, Andrew Looney and Kristin Looney.

Card games

The company is probably best known for its card games, especially Fluxx[1] , whose rules and goals change as the result of its players' actions[2] , and Chrononauts, themed around time travel. Both of these were designed by Andrew Looney and derive much of their popularity from the whimsical, unpredictable nature that he tends to give his games. While a player can definitely benefit from an overall strategy, the games are random enough to demand far more short-term tactical skill than long-term planning ability.

Looney Labs publishes a number of less popular card and board games (see Andrew Looney for a more complete list), but one of particular note is Are You a Werewolf?, Andrew Plotkin's thematic variant of Mafia. The game, which requires a relatively large number of people to play, is especially popular at game conventions such as Origins, where it frequently draws in players (and sometimes entire families) from other areas of the convention.

Icehouse pyramids

Looney Labs also produces and sells Icehouse pieces, small, colorful plastic pyramids useful for playing a variety of games as well as inventing new ones. In one sense they are the Labs' flagship product, being the original motivation for the company's launch (as "Icehouse Games, Inc.") in the 1980s, but they have yet to bring the company anything approaching the financial success of its card games. Rules for various Icehouse games are available on the web, as well as in the book Playing with Pyramids, which the Looneys publish.

Since 1999, Looney Labs has sold the pyramids in a variety of formats, but the game remains a cult phenomenon at best; the Looneys have yet to find a profitable packaging and marketing formula that appeals to a broad base of gamers. After unsuccessfully trying to sell four-color, 60-piece boxes, the company switched to a strategy of selling the pyramids in single-color, 15-piece tubes. In 2006 the company began phasing these out in favor of five-color, 15-piece tubes marketed as Treehouse, a stand-alone game.

Looney Labs hopes that this strategy of primarily selling a single game rather than an entire abstract game system will lead to more interest in Icehouse. The company has taken this strategy before with popular Icehouse games such as Ice Towers and Zendo, which were briefly available as standalone games sold in colorful retail packaging resembling that of more traditional board games. These did not last long in print, however, due to disappointing sales (despite Zendo winning the Origins Award for best abstract board game in 2003[3] and one of the 2005 Mensa Select games by American Mensa.[4]). The company is now betting that Treehouse's minimalist form and lower price tag will win the broad appeal that these games failed to capture.

Activism

Looney sometimes makes his opposition to American marijuana prohibition apparent in the games that he designs, slipping in various references to marijuana and its attendant culture. These include the players' ability to legalize marijuana through timeline manipulation in Chrononauts, or the clock reading 4:20 that can be seen on one Fluxx card. More recently, the company has published Stoner Fluxx, a variant of the popular game that is an overt celebration of pot and the fight to legalize its consumption in the USA. Their first run of Stoner Fluxx was published under the Looney Labs banner, but the desire to keep the main company more "family-friendly" has prompted the Looneys to create an imprint company, Fully Baked ideas, for future release of Stoner Fluxx and other "adult-oriented games". To date, this also includes one future project, tentatively titled Drinking Fluxx.

References

  1. ^ Tipping, Joy (12 April 2012). "Staying In: 'The Iron Lady,' 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and Zombie Fluxx". The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
  2. ^ Clifton, Paul (2009). "Sketch Game" (PDF). CHI. Retrieved 17 May 2012. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ "Origins Award Winners (2003)". Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design. Archived from the original on 2008-04-30. Retrieved 2008-08-15.
  4. ^ "Past Winners of Mensa Select Awards". Mensa U.S. Retrieved 2008-08-15.
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