Looney Labs - Icehouse Pyramids

Icehouse Pyramids

Looney Labs also produces and sells Icehouse pieces, small, colorful plastic pyramids useful for playing a variety of games as well as inventing new ones. In one sense they are the Labs' flagship product, being the original motivation for the company's launch (as "Icehouse Games, Inc.") in the 1980s, but they have yet to bring the company anything approaching the financial success of its card games. Rules for various Icehouse games are available on the web, as well as in the book Playing with Pyramids, which the Looneys publish.

Since 1999, Looney Labs has sold the pyramids in a variety of formats, but the game remains a cult phenomenon at best; the Looneys have yet to find a profitable packaging and marketing formula that appeals to a broad base of gamers. After unsuccessfully trying to sell four-color, 60-piece boxes, the company switched to a strategy of selling the pyramids in single-color, 15-piece tubes. In 2006 the company began phasing these out in favor of five-color, 15-piece tubes marketed as Treehouse, a stand-alone game. Around 2011, Looney Labs started selling their pyramids in pyramid bags instead of the tubes.

Looney Labs hopes that this strategy of primarily selling a single game rather than an entire abstract game system will lead to more interest in Icehouse. The company has taken this strategy before with popular Icehouse games such as IceTowers and Zendo, which were briefly available as standalone games sold in colorful retail packaging resembling that of more traditional board games. These did not last long in print, however, due to disappointing sales (despite Zendo winning the Origins Award for best abstract board game in 2003 and being named one of the 2005 Mensa Select games by American Mensa.). The company is now betting that Treehouse's minimalist form and lower price tag will win the broad appeal that these games failed to capture.