I wanted to try, luckily using siblings is not considered war crime. Since I had read about it in wikipedia we did not have culture to base it on. It morphed to basically uno with normal playing card deck but winner gets to make new rule, any rule. They will enforce it but they will not tell it to anyone else, they will just comment: "you broke rules, take penalty"
Since we played it way too much with siblings, we had times where my brother took 15 card penalty on game start. There was ~4 day trip we played near 30h of Mao.
I still love it, but can't play it any more since people rarely have attention to detuct the hidden rules. But also I feel creatively blocked since I can't make super complex rules when playing with new people, and the magic between my siblings has dimished bit.
I have a theory you can only induct a new player 'properly' (i.e. without them getting out their phone and consulting wikipedia) when you've got at least 3-4 experienced players.
Fewer than that and the new player won't see enough plays to figure out what the pattern is before they're buried in penalty cards. I've found this to be true even if the new player is a veteran board game player, used to paying attention to long games with complicated rules.
I can see that thou. I often had to give example rules for people, thou I feel like it robs part of the fun.
With more experts it could make things better, if they go easy on start. If they go full on with super hard rules, the half attention newbies would be lost.
Thou if the newbie really wants then they could learn in that big expert play too.
Followed closely by Eleusis the master of inductive reasoning card games, a brilliant zendo like experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_(card_game)
Cards had no meaning, there was no turn nothing.
But that is bit too lose base.
From our exploration we saw that rules that say you must do something are waaay more fun ad clearer, than rules like you can or can choose not to do. The choise rules made it basically impossible to detuct and even with in the context felt like the other is possibly cheating.
We also saw that people were quite concervative and really really hesitant to alter the base game rules.
Thou if we played couple of games and then chatted about everyones rules, and then reseted the game, people would open up bit. But the base rules (of basically uno) were quite sacred to break for people.
The rules were: •• Picture cards worth 10pts, black cards 50pts, number cards = n points •• At game end, 2 players with most points drink •• +4 can stack on +2, and vice-versa if color is right •• Uno Uno doesn't win unless no cards can be stacked anymore •• No deck shuffling
This resulted in the most fun and long Uno games, as people would keep the risky + cards till the end to stack on the Uno Uno player and keep him in the game. The no-deck-shuffling added an element of card-counting to the game as the discarded cards would be added to the bottom of the deck when no cards were left to draw.
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/408547/things-in-rings
Your link seems bit like mix of Mao and it.
And it does seem to have "the commercial" version of Mao.
I should look into it more.
1) rules requiring awareness of card order. "Have a nice day" is standard on 7, double 7's is "very nice" etc. Stack rules like that when combinations and/or cards of a suit are played and people have to remember 5 things they have to say or do after a card. Get's difficult over many rounds.
2) ice-breaking rules (if you're playing with new people). Friendly ones like "you must compliment _ when a _ is played." Great way to build/open someone up
3) rules changing play order. Aces reverse, add rules that e.g. skip a player and you'll have everyone waiting in suspense to see if the person who's turn it is actually knows its their turn. If not, "delay of game".
Play it with friends you'll be surprised with what people come up with!
Games between my brothers and me, rules such as: Specific card plays from next player. Or You are allowed to play +- 1 instead of exact same.
Nasty ones like: Third red is illegal. You are not allowed to put card, that would make sum of last three to be more than 15.
Those are quite fun. But probably my all time favorite is: "Eights live backwards"
I could live it at that, but the deeper explanation is that it is illegal to keep eights in had same way to other cards and it must be played up-side down.
This rule is the one my brother broke when he was shuffling the deck and got thought about "fixing" the eights.
Since some rules can be really rare and some really common, we started to do in expert games that the rule maker can set the card penalty. Multiple times per play? Basic 2 card punishment. ~once per game? 3-4
Rarer than that? +5, go wild as is the name of the game.
With newbies, standard 2 card punishment keeps things simple.
When each person have 2-4 rules from them and to keep all the other hidden rules in mind, the fun is chaos and chaos is fun.
It is also cool to debrief after and discuss with people if anyone managed to guess the others rules.
After that many people find it really hard to grasp the rules and possibilities. "How can the rules change without anybody knowing?" "How can they be enforced?" And so on.
To me the ideal would be no rules explained but as the embasidor, I do not get such possibility.
To others I explain some rules and example rules, such that we often want to sosialice so while you can make speaking rules they may be bit meh.
No one but one person made voice rules. My god I got burned in that game. I was constanly speaking as the explainer and keeping turn order up. I did not figure it why I got so many penalties from them, I had small feeling but could not figure the exact thing.
Turns out he was bit annoyed by me and the rule was: "you are not allowed to speak on your turn"
Obv I was not mad, I was amused when I got interesting game. Good times.
You start with an empty pizza box, and you need a large coin (the Australian 50 cents works well) and a sharpie.
Play progresses around the circle of players. Each player must flip the coin into the box. If they intersect no other circles, they draw a circle around the coin with the sharpie, and then write a rule into the circle (Whatever rule they come up with must fit legibly). They can change any aspect of the game. If you intersect with a circle, instead, that rule is activated. Just like 1000 cards, that could impact everyone, just you, whatever...
We usually got to a point where someone added a circle to "end the game", which then people might aim for - but usually only after a couple of hours of merriment!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
EDIT: I've also just remembered "Numberwang", which is a similar game with supposedly complex hidden rules from the comedy TV show "That Mitchell and Webb Look", where the players have to pick a number until they choose one that is "Numberwang"
I'd prefer to view it as comedians parodying games that do have complex rules.
There's also a parallel to Zork's "Double Fanucci" [0] and the League of Gentlemen's sketch "Go Johnny Go Go Go Go" [1] which dwells on the uncomfortable feeling of playing a game you don't know with enthusiastic people who know it well, and insist you'll easily pick up the rules as you play.
I've had ideas off and on for the last 2 years about how to translate Finchley Central into something you could play over the internet with strangers but I've never quite figured out how to make it work; I think a key aspect of these games is having shared context with your friends and trying to make them laugh.
Anyway, fun that your mind went to the same place!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finchley_Central_(game) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
English comedy at it's finest.
This post is 2/3 of the way through naming my three favorite fictional games! The 3rd member is, of course, 43-Man Squamish, the rules of which I cannot read without laughing so hard I weep.
[0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/you-know-what-neve...
Of course, there's probably no clean solutions in this space short of lots of sims. Regardless of whether new agentic stuff works for everything else in AI.. agent-based modeling seems likely to benefit from some kind of renaissance and that should be really interesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
The metagame within 1kbwc is that at the end of play people generally vote on which new cards to keep for seeding the next game, and which to discard. So you get a rush of joy if everybody liked your card and wants to keep it.
For an example of metagame play, one deck developed Angry Sheep, Sleepy Sheep, a bunch of sheeps, plus some rule card of "if there are more than five sheep, the person with the most sheep wins." People liked those, so they kept them. Then someone created a different card called the Sheep Herder, all of a player's sheep get stacked under the Sheep Herder, which passes one player to the left every time a sheep is played, so it slowly goes around the circle vacuuming up sheep. People liked this but started making Angry Goat, Sleepy Goat etc. so that they could have an alternate victory condition. Which led to the Goat Herder card that goes to the right as new goats are played. The meta-joke then reached its peak with the Herder Herder, which picks up Herders and moves them around the board, dropping the things that they are herding as it moves.
The key to 1kbwc is that anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun, not unless someone has a card called Counterspell that says "play me at any time to discard a card that some other player is playing, before it takes effect" etc. The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story and the players of the many rounds after rounds of it, are rewarded as the storytellers.
Yep exploring this question collaboratively is of course the real activity. Depending on your perspective it's barely recognizable as a game, or it's the ultimate / only game. Also kinda related here is Carse on finite and infinite games and Wittgenstein on language games[1,2]. It is "only" philosophy, but also feels ripe for more rigorous treatment
Presumably a good theoretical treatment would try to look at how games and their meta's are related: how the number and stability of rules changes the richness of interaction, enjoyment, flexibility in strategy, average duration and tolerable length of game-play, etc
[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22379733M/Finite_and_infinit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
What do you mean by "solution" here?
You could model most games with anything simple that's convenient (trees, state machines, term-rewriting systems). Meta-games, dynamic protocols, and multi-agent systems are broadly related but also different animals where you might need sims, full-blown process calculi, weird new kinds of logic. Depending on where you land a natural model candidate might be messy, maybe you have to give up things like completeness or decidability. Maybe the closest fit for a formalism here is dynamic deontic logic: https://www.cse.chalmers.se/~gersch/jlap2012.pdf
Would play again.
Playtest with your co-authors and let anyone create and use novel cards/actions during the game. Do it with an intention to create some consistant, balanced game in the end, so maybe avoid adding too-out-of-the-box stuff.
I wonder if someone has already created an app to assist card creations and make it easy to onboard people onto the game.
The rules we used were... we had a deck of index cards and we dealt them out, I think 7 each, and the deck was face-down in the center. On your turn, you'd draw a card, then play a card. If you had a blank card in your hand, you could create your own card, usually we'd have some time before starting the game to draw some.
It was very fun, especially fun to see what cards were being played and then creating one as a direct reaction to it!
The rules are simple. You join some group, that is playing a game, rules of which you don't know. Yet, you say to everyone, that you know the rules.
Now, your goal is to play as long as possible, before they figure out, that you actually don't know the rules.
Bonus points, if you convince others that it's THEY, who don't know the rules.
All games share one unwritten rule, which is that if you can convince all the other players that you've won, the game is over.
Her plan was indeed ruined.
