Photo by Nina at Board Game Geek
Piecepack is a game system designed with a set of components that can be used to craft games for.
The piecepack is to board games what a deck of playing cards is to card games. Like a deck of playing cards, it is also in the Public Domain. That means you can do anything with it, including inventing new games and selling your own. That is why there are a lot of variations. - What is a piecepack?
Some companies sell it as a retail box set but I think it’s beauty is in crafting your own from whatever materials and with whatever tools you have access to.
Components
A standard piecepack consists of 24 tiles, 24 coins, 4 dice and 4 pawns. The pieces have 4 suits and 6 ranks.
The suits are red suns, black moons, green crowns and blue arms. If you want to keep your piecepack easily compatible with any games designed for it, you want to stick with these suits but it’s your set so you can also make the suits whatever you wish.
The ranks are effectively 1-6 so any d6 die works but 1 and 6 have specific names and icons: a null and an ace, represented by empty and suit icon (or spiral) respectively.
4 types of components are included:
- Square tiles: 1 tile per suit/rank pair for a total of 24.
- On one side, the suit icon and rank, on the other lines that form a 2x2 grid.
- Round coins: 1 coint per suit/rank pair for a total of 24.
- Rank on one side, suit on the other.
- A small marker above the rank/suit on both sides to designate direction.
- Coins diameter should be less than half of the square’s so 4 of them fit on a single square.
- d6: 1 die per suit
- Coloured by their suits and all 6 ranks on different sides
- Pawns: 1 pawn per suit
- In the colour of the suit
- Can be any shape: I think cubes are easiest
People have also designed extensions that add more components. When crafting your piecepack, start with the standard and then add whatever extensions you like.