Icehouse pieces
nestable and stackable pyramid-shaped gaming pieces and a game system invented by Andrew Looney and John Cooper in 1987, originally for the game Icehouse
Icehouse pieces, or Icehouse Pyramids, Treehouse pieces, Treehouse Pyramids and officially Looney Pyramids, are nestable and stackable pyramid-shaped gaming pieces and a game system. The game system was invented by Andrew Looney and John Cooper in 1987, originally for use in the game of Icehouse.
History
Andrew Looney in 1987 penned a sci-fi short story, "The Empty City", that included a game called Icehouse, an ancient Martian game. Readers requested to learn how to play the game. Thus actual rules were invented for Icehouse by Andrew Looney, Kristin Wunderlich (then future wife of Looney) and John Cooper, then plastic pyramid pieces were made to play the game. The first commercially available set were solid non-stackable pyramids released in 1989 with only 100 sets made. The pieces were made from resin in his apartment, which upset the landlord. After several years, Looney shut down Icehouse Games, Inc. and soon started another gaming company, Looney Laboratories, in 1996.
Additional games beyond Icehouse were created including Martian Chess, Zendo, and Homeworlds.
The public source identifies “Icehouse pieces” as nestable and stackable pyramid-shaped gaming pieces and a game system invented by Andrew Looney and John Cooper in 1987, originally for the game Icehouse. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Icehouse, pieces and nestable.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5985651. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1989 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Icehouse pieces” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.