jazzfish: a black-haired man with a big sword. blood stains the snow behind (Eddard Stark)
[personal profile] jazzfish
As distinct from my semi-estranged friend Abby (2016). Via Cooperjohn on FB, I see that Kory Heath has taken his own life. Fuck.

I met Kory in, god, I don't know. I know I predated him in hanging out with the Looneys, and I'm pretty sure he showed up after plastic Icehouse pieces. Call it 2000? He and Coop and Jake and toK ("the other Kristin" as distinct from Kristin Looney) comprised a sort of game design syndicate in the 2000s, focused mostly but not exclusively on Icehouse games. Their designs tended to be a bit spartan and soulless for my taste but they were eminently playable. One of Kory's, Uptown (reprinted as Blockers) is an elegant and vicious abstract game of tile-placement that I am terrible at and will happily break out when I've got three or four people and half an hour to kill.

His magnum opus, though, was Zendo, a beautiful game of induction. The original used Icehouse pyramids; it looks like there's a new one that just uses weird plastic shapes. I was lucky enough to playtest Zendo for what I remember as several years but couldn't have been more than a few months, and both played in and Mastered a couple of Zendo tournaments at Origins. (I still have one of Zarf's Zendo lounge panels. Mine is in the top picture, second from the right.) Zendo is one of those games that feels like it wasn't designed so much as discovered, and it feels like that despite my clear memory of the volume of development and changes it went through.

Kory stopped coming to Origins some years before I did, so I have no idea when the last time I saw him was. I kept hoping he'd turn up at the Gathering: Coop and Jake and toK all did, after all. But no dice. Maybe he would have been there this spring, with the publication of his and Coop's "cooperative deductive Texas Hold'em" The Gang this past summer, and I could have told him how great it was.

Kory was brilliant and quiet and funny and kind. One night in the early 2000s I played board games with him and other folks at a townhouse up near Baltimore until four in the morning, and then drove back to my parents' place in Burke. I startled the crap out of him when I gave him a hug for winning an Origins award for Zendo. I'm so grateful I got to know him.

Fuck depression.

Date: 2024-11-20 01:06 am (UTC)
snippy: Lego me holding book (Default)
From: [personal profile] snippy
I'm sorry for your loss.

Date: 2024-11-20 01:29 am (UTC)
sartorias: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sartorias
I am so sorry.

Date: 2024-11-20 05:00 am (UTC)
jadelennox: Senora Sabasa Garcia, by Goya (Default)
From: [personal profile] jadelennox

oh no.

Date: 2024-11-20 11:15 am (UTC)
mrissa: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mrissa
I'm so sorry.

Date: 2024-11-22 04:35 am (UTC)
mneme: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mneme
Same, although I was only at best an accquaintance. I had known he passed, but not how; thanks for including that detail.

Date: 2024-11-23 02:57 am (UTC)
cthulhia: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cthulhia
I am also sad for the loss of our Zendo master.

I was shocked to hear it too.

I have the depression. I have no idea how I'll cope once I start having chronic pain.
Edited Date: 2024-11-23 02:59 am (UTC)

Date: 2024-11-24 11:00 pm (UTC)
lee_future: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lee_future
Sorry for your loss. Fuck depression, indeed.

Date: 2024-11-27 07:50 pm (UTC)
heptadecagram: (Default)
From: [personal profile] heptadecagram
I miss him, too. November has been pretty shitty for the past four years, starting with Petra back in 2020. I'm not sure if I've still got your correct phone number, but please reach out, 'cause I miss you.

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Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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