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.
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