Piecepack Wiki: Fortune Cookies

Dice, dice, dice: I must have more dice.
"If you can set the rules, you can win the game." --John McCormack
"If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one." --Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
"I also think that [the piecepack] needs a large collection of single player games. The piecepack equivalent of 'solitaire' could be a killer app." --Robert Mundschau, piecepack message #52 (See SolitaryConfinement)
"...it might be an interesting experiment to try to design a piecepack game by committee, similar to the way FUDGE RPG was designed." --James Kyle, piecepack message #68. (See GroupProjects.)
"In my head, I see the piecepack as board game components in need of detailed surroundings. Add a chessboard, a map of the world, a Lego set, a deck of cards, a LARP, some fantasy miniatures, 10 30-sided dice, plastic tanks, and/or some vampire character sheets, and you've got yourself a heck of a piecepack game. And not abstract at all." --Jim Doherty, piecepack message #71
"I view the piecepack as The Ultimate Accessory..." --Jim Doherty, piecepack message #71
"My attitude towards ideas and designs is summed up in the phrase (SW)^3 N, which translates to: 'Some win, some won't, so what! Next!'." --Dave Cousins, piecepack message #176
"As Tarzan named his boy, 'Boy', so I named my piecepack set,'Piecepack'. So in future e-mails, I might get excited and start accidentally referring to my piecepack by its name 'Piecepack'. When I do, please bear with me and realize that I am referring to my own piecepack by its name (a proper noun), and not a generic 'common' piecepack." --Dave Cousins, piecepack message #209
"You know I stole the name ['Wand of Odin' from game designer Jim Doherty], right? :) Seemed fair, I'm still looking for my pants." --Ed Thorn, piecepack message #254
Game design rule #1: Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting.
Game design rule #2: Find a human proofreader, or better yet, an editor. MS-Word's spelling/grammar checker is not enough.
Game design rule #3: The PiecepackGlossary is your friend; never invent a term if there is a standard term already in the glossary. If you really need a special term because it fits your game's theme, be sure to explicitly define it using a standard term from the glossary.
Game design rule #4: Never assume that a reader of your ruleset understands some technical or mechanical feature of your game. Always explain everything explicitly in detail. About all you can assume is that they know how to roll dice and shuffle & deal cards; everything else must be included in your ruleset.
Game design rule #5: Diagrams and pictures really are worth a thousand words. On the Internet, they are worth 2^10 = 1024 (1K) words.
Game design rule #6: Designing the game is easy; Writing a complete, coherent ruleset that is easy to understand is really, really hard.
Game design rule #7: Try to get at least one "blind" playtest session where the playtesters have never seen the game before and they try to play the game using only the written ruleset.
Game design rule #8: Quality is better than Quantity. Try not to get into a mode where you don't finish one game because you have moved on to the next.
Game design rule #9: A good ruleset reads like a story; it has a beginning, a middle and an end. For example, many rulesets have an introduction, a setup section, the body of the rules, winning conditions, options & variants and finally designer notes.
Game design rule #37: You know your game is boring when your playtesters spontaneously break out into an argument about the best set of Jenga rules for use with the pieces and your game doesn't even involve manual dexterity mechanics in any way, shape or form.
The name 'Wand of Odin' was the creation of Jim Doherty of Eight Foot Llama. 'And then I write, by morning light, and afternoon, and pretty soon, my name by Eight Foot Llama is cursed, when they find out, I published first!' (With apologies to Jim, the Llama, and Tom Lehrer)" --EdThorn, piecepack message #186
"I just have to quibble... 'piecepack' may be a common noun, but it is so in rather the same sense as Torx, Allen, and Phillips bits." --EdThorn, piecepack message #201
"I also didn't have a clue what piecepack was at Unity Games III, but I did snag a new copy of Wyatt Earp (which was probably my 29th choice)." --DavidCousins, piecepack message #219

FortuneCookies