I love good abstracts, and sometimes a theme can add something extra. This theme can fit almost any area control game with placement of one or more of each player's symbols.
However, lotus flowers do not grow on ice! Simply calling the tokens snowballs would make more sense, given that the player tokens have ice/snow crystal patterns.
I guess we could imagine the two teams carefully placing frozen lotus flowers that they've brought with them as markers, but seriously why not just use the abundantly available material as the players are supposedly playing on a lake while the ice is freezing or thawing...
My point of writing all this is to remind publishers that if you want to add some kind of theme to an abstract game, it has to be logical, since abstracts attract logical players and an illogical theme is not attractive... A beautifully designed abstract doesn't necessarily need a theme.
However, lotus flowers do not grow on ice! Simply calling the tokens snowballs would make more sense, given that the player tokens have ice/snow crystal patterns.
I guess we could imagine the two teams carefully placing frozen lotus flowers that they've brought with them as markers, but seriously why not just use the abundantly available material as the players are supposedly playing on a lake while the ice is freezing or thawing...
My point of writing all this is to remind publishers that if you want to add some kind of theme to an abstract game, it has to be logical, since abstracts attract logical players and an illogical theme is not attractive... A beautifully designed abstract doesn't necessarily need a theme.