Talk:Single stash games

"Ownership" in Single Stash Games

I was trying to think of the various different ways to distinguish between whose pieces are whose in single stash games that care. Add to the list if you think of others.

• Pointing: The piece belongs or counts for the player to whom it is pointing (or pointing away from).
• Size: Each player controls five pieces. Of course, this makes for an upper limit of 3 players, and limits your game pieces to 10 in a two player game. This design space needs games.
• Zoned: Players have a "home zone" in which pieces they control reside.
  • Grounding: In a two player game, one player could control the grounded pieces, and another player could control the ungrounded pieces. The pieces could thus switch ownership.
• Proximity: A player has some object whose proximity to pieces marks thier ownership. I can't think of any games that use this method. Perhaps this design space could be mined for new ideas.

Any single-stash game is also a Treehouse game.

(but that's obvious)

Not true.

Treehouse is single stash (because color is ultimately irrelevant), but not ever single stash game can be played with a Treehouse set. Imagine a game which requires 15 monochrome pyramids and which would be unplayable if three of those mids were opaque. For example, Tic Tac Doh is awkward, at best, if played with a Treehouse set (as one may not nest a tree nor tree a nest) because one would have to constantly peek under the medium and large opaques to see if they're making a nest.

The same could be said of Thin Ice, because an opaque could make it hard (or impossible) to confirm that you don't have "two pieces nested such that the point of one of your pieces clearly touching the inside point of another piece." And you can't just pick them up in that Jenga-like game of teetering towers.

Or imagine a memory game in which one needs 15 opaques (black, white, or gray set)--impossible with 12 of them being transparent.

David Artman 15:08, 10 June 2008 (EDT)

Ahh. That's clear; I wasn't reading the definition carefully enough, so I was taking "single stash games" to mean games whose piece requirement was "1 stash", rather than "1 transparent stash", "1 opaque stash", "1 red stash" etc. Daniel Cristofani 22:11, 10 June 2008 (EDT)

I hear ya... to avoid (some) confusion, we've sort of started to call Treehouse "sets" to contrast Icehouse "stashes."

Stash = 15 monochrome, transparent or opaque.

Set = 15 mixed colors, 3 of which are opaque.

See What Can I Play? for the most prominent page to make that distinctions (individual game pages might drift the terms a bit). HTH--David Artman 14:43, 11 June 2008 (EDT)