Andrew Looney is the creator of the commercial card game Fluxx and came up with the idea for Icehouse (though the actual game was created by John Cooper). Arcana is a game which was originally published in More Icehouse Games, 1996, a pamphlet describing five new games which could be played with Icehouse pieces and other equipment.

Arcana is played with a standard Icehouse set and a standard deck of tarot cards. An Icehouse set (or, at it's now called, an "Icehouse Game Kit") consists of a set of pyramids for each of 4 players. Each set contains 15 pyramids, 5 small, 5 medium, and 5 large. The pieces can be laid on their sides to point in a particular direction or stood on their bases to point upward. (In Icehouse, a piece on its side is attacking while a piece on its base is defending, but this distinction is not made in Arcana.) Alternately, Andrew Plotkin has a page describing simplified Arcana pieces, http://www.edoc.com/zarf/arcana-pieces.html

A standard tarot deck is 78 cards, divided into two types, the Major and Minor Arcana. The minor arcana consist of four suits, in England and America usually called Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins (or Disks or Pentacles); each suit consists of cards numbered 1-10 and four "court" cards, King, Queen, Knight, and Page. The major arcana are 22 individually-named cards usually numbered from 0-21, although sometimes the 0 card, the Fool, is unnumbered. (In traditional tarot games, the major arcana serve as a standard trump suit for a trick-taking game; in tarot divination, the cards are assigned various meanings based on the particular religious/spiritual belief of the person making up the divinition system.)

Full rules for Arcana can be found at http://www.wunderland.com/icehouse/Arcana.html, but here's a short description.

Deal nine tarot cards out to form a board, and deal three cards to each player. Each player in turn can take one action; actions include placing a piece on the board, drawing three cards, reorienting your pieces on the board, or playing a card either from your hand or on the board.

The object of the game is to control the most points of cards on the board after the deck runs out. You control a card on the board if you are the only player to have pieces on it. Playing cards is the real key to the game. Basically, on your turn, you can either play a card from your hand with a certain effect, or you can play the effect of a card on which you have a piece. The cards have basically the same effects whether played from your hand or "on the board", with a key difference: cards played from your hand are discarded, while cards played on the board remain in place and can be played again on a later turn.

There are four basic effects.

• Cups "grow" pieces, allowing you to either reproduce one of your pieces or to duplicate it. Cups only effect pieces which are standing upright.
• Wands allow you to move a piece which is pointing at another card.
• Swords allow you to attack another player's pieces on adjacent cards *or* attack and destroy adjacent cards.
• Pentacles allow you to play new cards onto the board, either expanding the board or changing the cards already in play.

The major arcana cards generally have one of these effects but stronger--for instance, the Death card acts like two sword cards played together, while the Empress card is a souped-up version of Cups.

So, if a player has a small piece standing upright on the 10 of Cups, the player can: use the 10 of Cups to "grow" the piece to a medium piece; use the 10 of cups to "clone" the piece, and put a second smallpiece on the card; play the Strength card (a major arcanum which acts like two Cups cards) from her hand to "clone" the piece and then grow it as well; reorient all of her pieces, allowing her to point the piece at another card; and so on.

As play proceeds, players' pieces spread across the board, reproducing and growing, attacking each other and expanding the board by playing new cards into empty spaces.

There are several handfuls of other minor rules; for instance, a court card of a suit--a King, Queen, Knight, or Page--can be played *from your hand* as any suit, which greatly increases the flexibility of your hand; and, as I mentioned above, each of the major arcana has its own special ability, some of which can be very powerful, such as the Hanged Man, which destroys an entire space and all of the pieces on it.

The tight constraints on player actions--for instance, the need to spend an entire turn to reorient your pieces--makes this a game of precise and careful play, and, in accord with Alan Moon's dictum of good games, the number of options available to you each turn is small and the decisions are difficult. At all times, you want to do more than you possibly can; of course, your opponents are also in the same position....

You will need to count your moves and understand how your opponents will react; you can't just barrel through your turn trusting everything will work out, especially during an attack. Despite this, the game moves quickly--individual turns are short with relatively, and the game moves inexorably towards a conclusion as the deck runs out.

The game overall is unforgiving of mistakes. For instance, if you grow all of your pieces to medium size or larger, it is basically impossible to bring small pieces into the game; and since you have only 5 of each size of piece, this will limit your available pieces for the rest of the game.

Another feature of play which is not instantly apparent is that getting into a war with another player is a quick road to destruction for both players. No matter how overwhelming your force, you can generally only destroy one of your opponent's pieces per turn, which gives him a chance to respond--by attacking, by fleeing, or (most annoyingly) by re-growing the pieces just destroyed. It's amazingly easy to get in a standoff in which both the attacker and the defender are trapped in a cycle of attack and regrowth, paralyzing both players and allowing the other players to move ahead.

I worry that this last consideration might make Arcana devolve into a game of petty diplomacy; however, I expect that with even slightly experienced players, attacks are avoided unless they can be quickly resolved.

All in all, I found Arcana to be moderately clever and quite enjoyable, an interesting combination of card-board games like Bob Abbott's Leopard with special-effect games like Cosmic Encounter or Wiz War. The rules are occasionally unnecessarily baroque, but not broken (god, I love that pun). Check it out!