It's tough to critique some of these pure abstract strategy games. I guess I wonder if it would become too easy to counter the moves people make to stop them from getting triangles, but would probably need to play the game to know for sure.

Your rules mentioned running out of triangles. I guess this would happen if the opponents kept putting triangles on top of yours, but how would the game work after that? Maybe you just lose when you don't have enough triangles left to win, since it sounds like running out of triangles would leave you with no way to win. Maybe it would work if there was some way to remove one of the opponents triangles that was on top of yours you could get that point back without needing another triangle?

My game! I made a little version of it out of tiny ceramic tiles to test it out.

http://differentname.com/2014/pilesofdead.jpg

The zombie movement goes pretty fast. I think it feels kind of like a dungeon crawl, where the actions you take (choosing which enemy to attack), are relatively straight forward, with a lot of randomness in how well you do. It turns out to be pretty fun anyway, but special abilities like in a dungeon crawl would do a lot to give players more interesting choices.

Then of course there's the worker placement style gameplay during the day, but I guess that doesn't utilize much stacking.

Since submitting the game, I've been thinking of making the game as a video game instead of a board game. It would have some differences of course, being a different medium.

Penterwaltz

This reminded me quite a bit of Rumis or blockus 3d. The description of the gameplay is very sound. I couldn’t find any criticism on the mechanisms. And it was also well written and easy to grasp. The game also adhered to the guidelines of the contest very well. The only reason that it wasn’t in the running for a medal from me is that it felt very familiar. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But this month had some very innovative ideas that really won me over. Overall a very good entry, great job!

TriXagon

This entry sounded like a simple and elegant abstract game. The description was concise. But I noted that I didn’t see it mentioned explicitly that a triangle must be placed ‘adjacent’ to the bead that was just played. I just went ahead and assumed that was the case as it seemed that was the intended gameplay. The mechanisms were interesting and I can see some depth of play. The gameplay captured the spirit of the contest very well. Overall another very good entry that was close to a podium spot. Great job!

Piles of the Dead

After reading thru this entry, the game reminded me very much of “Zombie Keep Out” from Privateer Press. Now that’s not a criticism, great minds think alike as they say. The integration of the Zombie theme was great and fit the mechanisms. And the game does sound fun from the description. But the stacks of wall tokens and zombie (dead body) tokens really only represented numbers and an easy visual representation of which side had more. So it didn’t explore that 3rd dimension as the focus of the contest. That was the only real criticism that I had for this entry. Otherwise it was well done, great job!

Beaverdam

This was my gold medal winner. I felt this entry really turned the idea of stacking components on it’s ear.. or in this case, at a 45 degree angle. The theme of building dams and diverting the waterflow was very unique and innovative. And the mechanisms really fit the theme as well as the guidelines of the contest. It’s also the only entry where the core of the gameplay was physics based. So Kudos again for the creativity. There were a few areas that could have used clarifications in the description as I did have to re-read it a couple of times. Also after reading the gameplay description, I did wonder if it would work at all. With all that said, I felt it still deserved the gold as it was the most innovative and creative entry in my opinion by trying to simulate fluid dynamics in a board game. So an excellent job!

Stapel

This game is similar to another one, and I think their idea for double sided tokens that you can flip would be a great idea for your game. This game seems a bit dull as currently written. There is not a whole lot of strategy.

Stack Overflow

I like the double-entendre relating to this month’s challenge. It’s a great way to visualize an electronic concept. While the 3-D stacking will help players to see the ‘stack overflow’, it really doesn’t add anything to the game that cards couldn’t do.

I was confused about the order tokens. They aren’t listed in the components section. I assume they are different than the money tokens. Money tokens are not stacked, but the orders are? What are some possible orders? I would like to see the other orders be more than just memory usage. For example, if you can complete simple lines of code, you get extra money. Since all tokens are stacked facedown it may be hard to get more than a three line code. If you could incorporate that, I would love to see the final product.

This is an interesting concept and a game I would really like to try playing. Unfortunately, it did not fit the challenge requirements as I understood them.

Sorry I didn't get to post my thoughts the last couple of days. I was away Friday and Saturday at Protospiel.

I voted silver for this game. Something about this entry struck me even though it wasn't the most three dimensional or the best use of stacking. I'm not even totally sure what it was that struck me, I'm not even a zombie fan at all. It does have one of the best thematic links to involve the stacking. I think it would be good if it was more about stacking zombies on top of each other to try and get over the wall.

I like the idea of only being able to place a piece onto larger pieces like in Towers of Hannoi. I think the idea of turning Towers of Hannoi into a competitive game rather an individual puzzle is interesting. However, I didn't feel like this game had quite enough strategy yet. I think it would be better to have each player start with two full towers in opposite corners of a 3x3 grid and then players compete to get a completed tower onto a non corner space.

I really like the structure of the game with worker points, the different block types, and the cards. I think that should work very well. As already highlighted the scoring still needs some thought and the theme has some inconsistencies. The theme could fixed easily by using a fictional ancient civilization. The biggest obstacle for the game would be pyramids falling over. The blocks would have to have a way of interlocking. For playtesting you could use lego.

Beaverdam
It wasn’t clear for me how would the water fall down. Do you have to take the trees at the bottom first? It seems like if someone takes a tree from the top the marbles will start falling and game will be over. I don’t like giving the players the option of ending the game at any point.

Piles of the dead
Seems like a nice cooperative game, not a fan of the genre though, but i can see mechanics for a free for all or semi cooperative game already there, as every player has its own lane and zombies move from lanes, it could be about trying to survive by sending the zombies to your neighbors.

Stapel
I like how the different sizes play into stacking and moving, but having only 5 discs and a 3x3 board makes the game feel Tic-Tac-Toeish and solvable, and you wouldn’t be able to do much moving with 5 discs either.

Rise of the Pyramids
After rereading the rules i like it more than before as it’s seems to have interesting decisions, though depending in how exactly Sabotage works (does all cubes supported by the pulled cube fall down or are discarded?) could break the game as that would be so aggressive, and it could lead to the game being too political.

Tower
As a dexterity game it goes against the rules, and i’m not sure how much does the dice is necessary, and what it is supposed to do or change the color of the block.

Toppling Towers

This game immediately made me think of the angry bird game. Not the app, but the tabletop game. It is almost identical, but with a ‘slingshot’ instead of a ‘catapult’. So, I couldnt give this game any medals.

Grab a Stack

Stacking really doesn’t add anything to this game, you could easily play this game in 2-D space. It feels like there may be too much randomness with the luck shifting to those who pull a star token. The game is really driven by the rules and not the players. The only decision in the game is when to take a stack. I think this game may be more interesting if players are allowed to add a token to any of the stacks and the stars are color coded, so they can only take the stack with their color on top. Players would then keep their star tokens secret.

I agree with Mr.S that there is too much importance in who draws the star tokens. Maybe there should be a fixed number of stacks you are allowed to grab, but you also have to discard a piece of your choice to grab a stack. I'm not sure there's enough room for strategy as each piece can only be placed in a set stack. Maybe you could make it so that each piece has two stackable features to choose from (like match number or colour).

Thanks for the reviews on Piles of the Dead. Here are a few comments on your comments. :p

Although this is true for the spot right next to the wall, zombies also have to climb up onto that spot. I probably should have the wall start higher to make this more clear. Imagine a wall stacked 5 tiles high, so a zombie on top of a stack of 4 bodies could climb over. But a zombie can only get into that stack of 4 bodies by climbing onto other adjacent stacks first. So with a higher wall, it ends up becoming a mound of bodies pressed up against the wall, with zombies climbing their way up the 3d mound to get to the top of the wall.

I did think about making it an asymmetrical one on one game, but felt like the zombies moving forward would feel too automatic? So I decided to automate it with the rules and make them the enemy of a co-op game. Maybe you're right, and I could have focused on making the part where you control zombies more interesting, in a way that you're really playing in 3 dimensions.

That sounds really fun! I can imagine that with a lot of dark humor. It makes me think a bit about Puzzle Strike, sending gems at your opponent, which they can eliminate (like killing zombies), or send right back at you as a weapon. It also reminds me of the South Park episode with the homeless people getting sent to other towns.

Squares Cubed
The scoring in this game seems very odd, requiring a lucky roll of the dice, and a lucky choice of face down cubes to match your tokens to score. This is a lot of complexity, without really offering strategy choices.

Mr S makes a good point that the one strategy players would attempt is to not make 4 connected cubes, since their opponents would be the ones to play a cube on the next level.

Skyward: War above the Stars
I'm surprised this one didn't get votes. I had this in my top 5 or so as I was narrowing down what to vote on. It sounds like it could be a good game, and it uses three dimensions in an interesting way. I guess as I narrowed down my votes I just looked for games where stacking was more central to the game.

This game has a clever take on being three dimensional, but the issue is that it is only three dimensional in a virtual sense not a literal sense which the challenge was going for. I like a lot of the concepts in the game like the modular board, the way the pieces are moved, and how to line up possible attacks. However, it seems like there needs to be more to the conflict resolutions than a simple high role wins.