Part of my recent Legomania is due to our considering including some games that use Lego as components in Games Unboxed. Clark and I determined that Legos are "ordinary components" because nearly everyone has some, especially if they have kids. Lego brick designs are in the public domain because Lego's patents have expired, and there are many compatible clone brands. I'm happy to see there are even web forums devoted entirely to Lego clones (forum 1, forum 2, forum 3). Open-source Legos!

Not only that, but there are now intersystem protocols for connecting Legos and clone brands with other kinds of building toy systems, such as K'nex, which are a hub-and-spoke system like Tinkertoys. For example, there was a patented toy called Sploids (now defunct) that connected Lego and K'nex; these days, K'nex makes its own Lego-compatible bricks.

Thus, I see Lego and the like not only as a toy system and as "ordinary equipment", but as a highly flexible game system, and I'm trying to prove it by showing that you can play almost any chess variant with a Lego set. I'm also in the early stages of work on some of my own games using Lego as components, but more about that later.

I didn't mention in my initial post about my new project, Games Unboxed (with Clark Rodeffer), that the book will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, or something close to it. This means that we'll probably have a website where you can read the rules to the games for free, and a printable PDF of the entire book that you can obtain from the website, as well as download from the usual places like BoardGameGeek and email to your friends. Even if you don't want to print the entire book, you might want to print individual games from it, reference cards, player aids, printable boards, and so on. We'll make those available individually as well as within the PDF.

We haven't got a publisher yet. What if they don't like this idea?

Sucks to 'em. Liberating our content is non-negotiable. We'll shop the manuscript around until we find someone who will publish it. But I don't think we'll have much trouble. My last book, Mind Performance Hacks, has sold around 30,000 copies since February 2006, and is currently hovering around Amazon sales rank 5000 (anything above 10,000 is great) -- yet it's "pirated" like mad all over the world. Hardly a week goes by that I don't get a Google Alert or two notifying me it's been uploaded illegally to another site. In study after study, "piracy" has been shown to help sales.

I've printed many an ebook, free and otherwise, and in almost every case, I'd rather have a nice, official, bound copy than my crappy laser-printed one, crappily spiral-bound by some barely sapient Kinko's employee working for crap wages. But if you want the PDF, you shall have it, and all permutations thereof.

Because we love you.

As some know, I'm the primary author of the O'Reilly book Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain. For my next hack, I mean trick, I propose to collaborate with my friend Clark Rodeffer (cdrodeffer) on a book with the working title Games Unboxed.

This book, which is quite far along, and which we expect to submit to a publisher in Q4 2008, is a collection of games you can play with "standard equipment", meaning things like Chess and Checkers sets, standard decks of cards, six-sided dice, pen and paper, coins, and other things you might have around the house if you're a gamer, including beer and pretzels. There have been several books like this in the past, the most notable of which is probably Sid Sackson's 1969 collection A Gamut of Games, which is so magnificent it has its own Wikipedia entry.  We aim to be just that magnificent, or more so -- a collection of designer games that incorporate the game design lessons of the last 40 or so years since Gamut, including the German games revolution; a collection of games that might come in a box, but instead come in a book.

We currently have roughly 170 game submissions, about 20 of which are definites so far. We're aiming for 100 games in the finished book. We've been rewriting the games we like (for clarity and house style, not to change the rules or take credit for them). When we have 25 we think are in publishable shape, we'll submit them to some publishers in the form of a book proposal. We're not just editors or rewrite artists. Clark and I will each have anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen games in the book ourselves.