Richard Gottlieb

Open Source Board Games
July 22, 2008

In an earlier blog, I wrote about my admiration for the electronic gaming industry’s business model. I wrote at the time: 

A hardware producer like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft makes the gaming hardware and any number of software producers creates and markets games to play on them. It makes me wonder if this open and collaborative approach to business rather than the secretive and closed model so common in the toy industry is, at least in part, what makes that industry so successful. 

I closed the blog by writing:

What would happen if some clever toy inventor set his or her sights on creating the next big three-dimensional play platform and some enterprising toy company figured out a new business model that would allow it to license its platform to those who want to create and sell play variations for it?

Well, we may just find out. In a TechRepublic article by Jay Garmon entitled “Martian Chess: The quasi-open source board game,” we learn that a company named Looney Labs is doing just that.

Here is how author Garmon describes it:

Quick question: Who holds the intellectual property rights to poker? Gin rummy? Spades? Nobody, that’s who. These games can be played with any common set of playing cards — and these games are just a handful of the possibilities open to anyone with a basic 54 card deck. This philosophy is what influenced game maker Looney Labs — the same guys who created the geek favorite card game Fluxx – to develop the Icehouse game system. It’s like a 21st century set of playing cards, as designed by Egyptian pharaohs from the distant future.

As the author rightfully points out: “[T]here’s nothing stopping you (or anyone) for dreaming up new games using these basic tools.”

If you know of anyone else creating three dimensional open source games or toys let us know. It could be, if not the future, certainly a future for Toy Nation.

Posted by Richard Gottlieb on July 22, 2008 | Comments (1)