History of the Company
As of April 25, 2005

Looney Labs was founded in 1996, when Kristin and Andrew Looney dissolved Icehouse Games, our original game company (and Geronimo! Industries, our even-smaller holiday gift publishing enterprise) in order to form a new company, Looney Labs. Having cut our teeth on hobby-level practice businesses, we were ready to try to make publishing games our livelihood.

In our first year, we published Fluxx, the card game with ever-changing rules. It was an immediate hit, and as such allowed them to pursue every independent game inventor's dream: licensing the publication rights to another company. We received distribution offers from several mid-sized game companies, including Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE), who republished the game in a nicely updated Second Edition. ICE proceeded to distribute Fluxx for the next two years, but unfortunately they were facing serious financial difficulties, and when ICE went bankrupt and the Fluxx distribution contract was suddenly made void, the Looneys decided to resume publication themselves. (Fluxx Version 2.1, as the new Looney Labs re-issue was called, featured just a few cosmetic changes to the ICE edition.)

In our second year, Looney Labs published Aquarius, our second card game and our first in full color. Andy began updating the website every week, and started doing programming work on a part-time basis only, devoting the rest of his time to creating new products, like 53 Spades, Arthur's Buttons, the Y2K Countdown Calendar T-shirt, and Proton.

In our third year, Kristin also exited the regular working world, stepping down from her position as the information systems manager at TSI-TelSys in order to focus on running and expanding Looney Labs. With both of the Looneys working full-time (and with the help of Alison Frane, who joined the team in early 1999) we built a new on-line game store, dedicated to promoting and selling cool games invented by our small game company peers. We also significantly improved our order collection and product fulfillment infrastructure, both on-line and off, and also finally re-published Icehouse, the game we first went into business to produce, over a decade before. The new Icehouse set was a dream-come-true, with stunningly beautiful injection-molded plastic game pieces and the rules for the best of the dozen or so games you could play with those fascinating little pyramids.

In 2000, our fourth year, we released several more new products, including Q-Turn, Black Ice, Button Broccoli, and Chrononauts. We also finally starting getting our product line into a lot more game stores, through the many distributors we signed up by exhibiting at the trade only shows like Toy Fair and GAMA and the Alliance Open House, as well as the major consumer gaming shows, Origins and Gen-Con. We also started hosting hospitality suites called Pop-Tart Cafes at selected science-fiction conventions.

New products for 2001 included Cosmic Coasters, expansions for Fluxx and Chrononauts (Fluxx Blanxx and Lost Identities) and Icehouse Pieces by the stash tube, in new colors.

2002 saw the addition of a new book of Icehouse games called Playing with Pyramids, a new card game called Nanofictionary, and the popular party game Are You a Werewolf?

For 2003, we added Zendo, IceTowers (including Andy Looney's book The Empty City) and Stoner Fluxx to the product line. German company Amigo Spiele licensed Fluxx and released German Fluxx in full color. This year we also hired our first full-time employee.

In 2004, Early American Chrononauts and Flowers & Fluxx were released.

Our ninth year, 2005, we introduced EcoFluxx and Family Fluxx. Also, Fluxx was licensed by HobbyJapan, and they subsequently published Japanese Fluxx.

The 10-year anniversary, 2006, saw the release of Treehouse, in Rainbow and Xeno colors, which in effect completely changes the way players are introduced to Icehouse games. We're also developing Fluxx Español and more…

We add interesting new material to our website every week, and new products to our gift shop as frequently as we can. If you would like to be notified when something new is added to our product line, visit our list robot and sign up for our new product mailing list, and/or one of our other special interest mailing lists. Particularly enthusiastic fans are encouraged to get involved with the Mad Lab Rabbits program, now in its infancy.