Haus Rules started on a Sunday evening last autumn. We had an hour, a blank project and a rule: only use shapes we could draw without opening an image editor. That left a triangle, a square and a circle.
By the end of the hour you could stack them into something that looked like a house. A square for the walls, a triangle for the roof, a circle for a window. It was ugly, but we kept building houses long after we should have gone to bed, and that seemed like a good sign.
The fourth shape problem
Every few weeks one of us suggests adding something. A half-circle for arched doors. A long rectangle for chimneys. A trapezoid, once, late at night.
We tried most of them. Each new shape made individual houses look nicer and made the puzzles worse. With three shapes, you can look at a plot and hold every option in your head. With five, you start guessing. The constraint is the game.
Tenants instead of shapes
So instead of new pieces, we added people who want things. A cat that needs a round window at a certain height. A family that wants the roof directly above the kitchen. A neighbour who won't accept any shadow on their garden.
The shapes stay the same for the whole game. What changes is who you're building for, and that has given us far more variety than any new piece did.
We'll write more about tenants soon. Next post is about physics, and how we nearly ruined the game with it.
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