At Looney Labs, the Mission is Fun

Some basements are filled with boxes and junk. Some are furnished. And in College Park, you might stumble across a basement occupied by former NASA employees designing card games for a living. Such is the life of Andy Looney, his wife, Kristin, and a little company they call Looney Labs.

“Our mission is simply to create fun.  That's our official corporate mission.  And we create fun in the forms of card games and board games: analog, non-digital, paper, cardboard, tabletop games,” Looney explained from his closet-sized office.

Looney, a College Park native, didn’t set out looking for game design opportunities.  He found himself in college unsure of what to do and debated between computer programming and fiction writing. He decided to major in computer programming, leaving writing as a hobby, but a life-changing one.

A short story that Looney wrote in the summer of 1987 included a few characters playing an imaginary game with some small pyramids.  It was just a plot device, but his readers saw it as much more.

“I would give [the story] to my friends and say, ‘So what do you think?’  And they're like, ‘Well, you know, the story's okay, but the pyramid game! I want to play that game!’  And that's literally where it happened. The five-paragraph description of this imaginary game led to everything we're doing,” Looney said.

And so it came to be that the Looneys spent their free time bringing the imaginary game to life. Both were employed at NASA at the time, where Andy was a computer scientist and Kristin an electrical engineer. In 1999, the couple took the “jump off of the cliff” and did what they could to design games full-time.

Making the pyramids, however, wasn’t easy. The mold that they needed cost $10,000.      

Kristin suggested a card came, instead, because, as she told him, “Cards are easy.  These pyramids are killing me.”

The next day, he came up with the idea for Fluxx.  Fluxx, the Looneys’ most popular game, is all about change. It starts with drawing one card and playing one card, but gradually gets more “crazy and chaotic,” incorporating changes in rules and goals.

The uncertainty is what makes it fun, Looney said.

In most games, “you get about halfway through the game and it starts to become real obvious that so-n-so's got the hotels set up, and boardwalks,” he said. Eventually, he added, “we're just counting down the turns until I've lost all my money and they win.”

Not so with games from Looney Labs. They’re designed so that the players often can’t see what’s coming.

“Right when someone else does win, [you think] ‘AH! I was all set!  I was going to win on the next turn!’” Looney said.  It “leaves you feeling that ‘Ah, we've gotta play again.  I need a re-match right now.’”

As its name implies, Fluxx itself is constantly undergoing change. The Looneys have launched multiple versions of it, including Martian Fluxx, Family Fluxx and Monty Python Fluxx. Pirate Fluxx came out a few months ago and has already sold more than 11,000 copies. And with each theme comes, of course, more changes.

In order to make Zombie Fluxx, for example, Looney decided to introduce the “Creeper,” a whole new card.

The original Fluxx is now on version four, Looney said. “It's been updated over the course of the product to reflect the changes in the way the changing game had changed.  It's kind of amazing, really.”

One change the Looneys won’t make is a shift to electronic gaming.  About a third of their games are sold online, with the rest sold through small retailers, but the link to the digital world mostly ends there. Going electronic would defeat a large part of his purpose.

“Much as you can play computer games and have a great time doing them, at the same time, there is no substitute for actually sitting around a table with your friends, having a face-to-face experience using physical components,” he explained.

They’re doing fine and growing without the electronic component anyway, Looney said.

“We're not a household name yet and we're still a very small company working in a basement.  But we get [almost] a million dollars in sales,” he said.  “Every day we become more and more successful.”

For Looney, there’s something particularly special about getting together with other people to play games.  He’s had a group of friends coming over once a week for 20 years and hopes his own games inspire the same sort of gatherings.

“I have a long-term vision of opening a kind of gaming parlor coffee shop place where people can come and hang out and play our games,” he said. “But you know, check back with me in like 20 years and we'll see if I did that, because that's very, very theoretical.”

While fans wait for the “Looney Lounge,” they can check out a dream of Looney’s that is already coming true -- a re-launch of the pyramid system that started the business.

“It's not just a game, it's a game system with lots of different games, much like a deck of playing cards can be used to play Poker, or bridge, or go fish, or war, or crazy eights, or whatever,” he said. Looney, who was wearing one of the small pyramids on a necklace, explained, “You get a set of these pyramids, and you can play many different … literally, at this point, hundreds of games.  A couple dozen by me, but many, many by our fans.”

There are likely more games to come. Looney has a lot of ideas that haven’t come to fruition yet, but he’s excited to get to work on them.

“It's my life, you know,” Looney said.  “I am the company, and it's the main thing I do. We try to get out and do other things ... but at the end of the day, I'm all about the games here.”