Egyptian Solitaire and other pyramid thoughts

 The first activity I used the Pyramid Arcade for was playing Egyptian Solitaire. Honestly, I thought it would be Treehouse since I have a long, happy history with that game but there you have it.

Egyptian Solitaire is a Looney Pyramids variant of the classic peg solitaire. The twists are that the pyramid doing the jumping can land on another pyramid the same size or an empty space and the fact that each space has three pyramids to clear.

By the way, I am profoundly terrible at it. I do enjoy it and I can’t help but hope someday that something will click in my head and I will solve it. And it’s a perfect information puzzle so it is solvable.

The base version is a three by four grid but you can expand it it make it more difficult/interesting.

So, you use some stackable pyramids to recreate a puzzle that goes back to the 1600s, if Wikipedia is to be believed. (Since anyone can edit it, you should always have approach Wikipedia with a grain of salt) So the question is: does it do something unique that you’d need the pyramids for and is it any fun?

And I think the answer to that is yup.

Now, I wouldn’t buy a pyramid set just to play Egyptian Solitaire (I did buy both colors of Treehouse when they came out, just to make a comparison) It is a nice little something to do with pyramids you bought for other games though. (I will say that Food Chain Island is a vastly superior reinvention of the peg solitaire puzzle)

Egyptian Solitaire does highlight two elements of the Loony Pyramids and gaming systems in general. Does it let you play a game and do you need the game system to play it?

On one extreme, Ricochet Pyramids lets me play a game almost exactly like Ricochet Robots without the trouble of having that oversized box in my closet. However, I could use that rule set to play Ricochet Pyramids with some other bits. (I don’t but I could) On the other hand, I think it would be really hard to cobble together a Volcano set without anything other than the pyramids and I think that’s an absolute banger of a game.  

Egyptian Solitaire in no way reinvents any wheels but I do like an excuse to play with little plastic pyramids.