Sand Filled Icehouse Pieces

Heavier is Better

February 2002

Explanation

At the 12th International Icehouse Tournament in 2001, Ryan McGuire had a stash of clear plastic Icehouse pyramids that he'd filled with colored craft sand, sealing the bottoms with hot-glue. I thought these looked really cool, but the real kicker didn't come until I played against one of these stashes in the tournament Ice-Offs. At one point I captured one of these sand-filled pieces as a prisoner, and when I picked it up I was immediately impressed with its heft.

In Icehouse, the heavier your pieces can be, the better. They're easier to let go of when you're placing them, harder to crash out of place when they're on the field, and more difficult to pick up during capture. Heavier is better.

It took me a few months to get around to making my own stash of sand-filled pyramids, but here they are. I call these pieces my "Rust Dust" stash, since they're filled with red and brown sand to approximate Martian dust.

When I finished, I weighed the stash along with a bunch of other stashes, and came up with the following table.

As you can see, sand-filled pieces are reasonably heavy, if you compare them to anything besides solid rock.

Materials

You'll need a stash of clear plastic pyramids, some craft sand in the color(s) you want, some hot-glue and a hot-glue gun, and one of those pads that hot-glue doesn't stick to. You don't need a lot of sand. A single ~0.5 cup package is more than enough.

The Process

1. Fill the pieces to within about an eighth of an inch of the base.
2. Fill the remaining space with molten hot-glue.
3. Quickly flip the piece over and press it down to the pad as hard as you can manage.
4. Leave the piece on the pad until the glue is completely cooled off.
5. Repeat for every piece in the stash.