Long time ago, I was looking for game with some hidden rules, browsing random wikipedia.
I came across Mao [1].
It looked so cool, game that has it is culture.
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.
There's a drinking game which I guess is inspired by this game, which I believe is called "Pizza Box" (at least that's what everyone I ever met who knew it called it).
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!
This is a meta-game. I got curious about related topics in game theory once and found out about [1,2]. There are also a few papers directly trying to study calvinball and so-called minimal-nomic. It's pretty crazy how little we know theoretically about this stuff, considering how relevant games with dynamic rules actually are for daily life.
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.
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.
I love 1k bwc, just played it at a friend's going-away party. It's surprisingly hard to explain to folks who have never played before -- there's a lot of 'wait, what am I even supposed to do?' But if you have any friends in improv or folks who are good at coming up with clever cards, it's a lot of fun
Fluxx is cool - it’s like a more structured version of this. IIRC it does have a theoretically finite rules space, but there are many, many unique fun combinations of rules, and it feels like you’re devising your own. I highly recommend it!
I’m glad there can be no “official” (ie mass produced) version of this game. In true spirit of the game. As much as I wish we had more Calvin and Hobbes related merchandise bc I love it.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)
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!
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.