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Category: Games

The piecepack system, and a game I made that uses it

Everyone's seen a deck of cards before. 52 cards, 13 ranks, 4 suits. Use it to play a bunch of different games. Pretty standard stuff.

But what if you want to play board games in the same way? Well, let's see... chess pieces, checkers, pawns, dice, resource tokens... aggghhh, all these different pieces and you don't even use them all in all the games?! These pieces are too specific! We need a set of pieces that's standardized for use with a wider variety of games!

That's where the Piecepack system comes in! It's a set of 56 generic pieces that are pretty commonly used among many different games, creating a baseline for playing many different games with the same pieces. Piecepack's components and specifications are all in the public domain. It's available on Tabletop Simulator, but if you're looking for a physical set, the most commercially available one on the market is called "The Infinite Board Game". You can also make one yourself, either through 3d printing or by hand.

A piecepack set has four suits: black Moons, red Suns, green (or sometimes golden) Crowns, and blue Arms. Additionally, most of the pieces have one of six ranks, ranging from 0 to 5. The 0 rank is called "null" and is indicated by either a 0, an N or simply a blank space. The 1 rank, just like in a deck of cards, is called "ace" and is indicated by either the suit symbol, the letter A, or a spiral.

Each of the four suits has:

  • Six tiles. A tile has its suit and rank on the front, and a 2x2 grid of squares on the back. Tiles are used to build the gameboard.
  • Six coins. A coin has its suit on one side, and its rank on the other. Additionally, a coin also has a dot indicating which direction it's facing in. In terms of dimensions, the coins are, by necessity, half or less of the width of a single tile, since they need to be able to fit inside one square.
  • One die. A die has its suit's color, and a rank on each face. (Usually, the piecepack system only uses one die per suit, but my set came with three, so I guess I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.)
  • One pawn. This is the simplest piece in the piecepack, since it has only one characteristic: its suit. Pawns have no rank or direction.
In addition, this set of pieces is easily expandable. Some common expansions for the piecepack lineup include additional suits, additional ranks, "matchsticks", which can be used to build walls, roads and more, decks of cards (for when you want randomness, but not as much randomness as dice provide), and "saucers", which go underneath the pawns, and provide them a direction when they otherwise wouldn't have one.

When I heard about this system, it got me thinking, and I wanted to make a game that used as many of the mechanics of the base piecepack as possible. I'm not good with names, so I just made up some random non-words and used those, with the goal I had in mind being to just make the dumbest-sounding game ever.

The rules for the game are a bit long for me to put in a single SpaceHey post like this, so instead, here's the Google Docs link for them.


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