Snowblind

Snowblind

Designer: Jonathan Leistiko
Publisher: Invisible City Productions
Type: Icehouse
Status: Free
BGG entry: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/21559
Available at: http://www.invisible-city.com/play/174/snowblind

How do you win a game if you have more control over your opponents’ pieces than your own? Figure out the answer in Snowblind, a quasi-strategic Icehouse game for 4 players.

Object: To maximize your score and minimize your opponents’ scores by putting pieces in taller and smaller stacks, respectively.

You Need:

• Four Icehouse stashes of different colors.
• An opaque bag (or other opaque container).
• A 4×3 grid. A Volcano board or chess board with some squares blocked off works just fine.
• Some paper and a pencil for tallying scores at the end of the game.

On your turn, take a piece out of the bag and put it on the board. When you put a piece on the board, it must point upward. Pieces are played by these rules:

• Any piece may be placed in a vacant space.
• A smaller piece may be 'engulfed' by a larger piece if the smaller piece is resting directly on the board.
• A piece of smaller or equal size may be placed on another piece of equal or greater size.

Once you have placed a piece, play passes to the left. The game ends when all pieces have been played. After this, all the stacks are scored. Stacks have a value equal to the point value of the pieces in the stack, multiplied by the number of pieces in the stack. Points are tallied separately by color. A piece that is 'engulfed' is scored by the color that’s engulfing it, not by the 'owner' of the engulfed piece. Engulfed pieces do not count for being in a stack.

The player with the highest total at the end of the game wins.

Several variants to the rules are also available on the website.