1000 Blank White Cards
en.wikipedia.org354 points by eieio a day ago
354 points by eieio a day ago
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.
> I still love it, but can't play it any more since people rarely have attention to detuct the hidden rules.
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.
Interesting theory. I haven't had change to try that kind a situation. The biggest game by people was like 6 people and 2 experts.
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.
I introduced this to so many people as the only one who knew how to play. Key is start the game with 3 cards and win the round quickly + be super diligent about the rules so no conflicting information. Win the round quickly, add an obvious rule and by the third round it's fair play.
Dutch Mao (mentioned briefly in the wiki) is a variant where everyone comes up with a hidden rule before the game begins, and is one of my favorite games of all time.
Followed closely by Eleusis the master of inductive reasoning card games, a brilliant zendo like experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_(card_game)
Love this game. It was especially popular during boy scout camping trips for me. I don't know if anyone would have the patience for it anymore, unless the internet went down for a week or something.
On a ski trip with friends we spontaneously turned a game of Uno into a Mao drinking game.
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.
Mao took over my summer camp like wildfire in 2005. Fellow councilors and I would often consolidate the rules between camp sessions and we kept running clearing out playing cards from the Kenora grocery store to play on our island. Fond memories. It's definitely one of those games that suites camp life, with the culture of play and hidden rules.
Once we got really exploratory with my brother. We eliminated all the rules, expect empty hand wins.
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.
I had a friend who started the game saying, "The game of Mao is like the game of life. You come into it not knowing the rules but you get penalized for them anyway." I always liked that opening, more than "The only rule you may be told is this one."
Do you have examples for good made up rules? I want to try it next time being with friends.
Some newbies seem to go for rules like: It is illegal to take even number as punishment. Or You can only play sevens in pairs. Or King skips next one.
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.
I used to play this a ton (often as a drinking game). The wiki does a good job of explaining the basics and I'd always do the no talking + point of order variants (+ a few others). My favorite type are:
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!
Playing the 2 of clubs was a "total failure" and you would be handed the entire draw pile.
Interesting, that kind of reminds me of Things In Rings [1]. I haven’t played it yet but it looks pretty good.
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/408547/things-in-rings
Instantly thought about Mao too, we'd play it with friends in-between classes in college. Good times. Making players say "thanks" after receiving a penalty (or keep receiving penalties) never got old.
Heh, since for us it was time with our dad, we needed to be able to chat. So before first test play we decided not make rules around speaking.
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.
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!
We played this in college but with a 30-rack box, and instead of coin sized circles it was more of a self-growing Voronoi diagram, where you could continue to bisect whatever shape you landed on with a unique rule.
There's a british comedy radio show called "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" that plays a game called "Mornington Crescent", which can be viewed as a similar sort of game, but it only really works in the specific context of the radio show. In theory, it's just comedians listing off london tube stations until one says "Mornington Crescent", and then they "win". In practice, it's played as though there is a vastly complex rulebook of secret rules, and players will react as though the current player may have made a clever play or a mistake or something
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"
> it's just comedians listing off london tube stations
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.
Ah! Right after submitting 1000 Blank White Cards to HN I thought of Finchley Central[1] which (I think) is the game that Mornington Crescent comes from. I learned about Finchley Central a few years ago while reading about the history of The Game[2] (sorry).
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)
Link to the sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU
English comedy at it's finest.
My favorite thing about Mornington Crescent is that, if you're not careful, you could end up "in spoon."
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.
Reminds me of that one messed up game[0] in 17776[1] (which I highly recommend reading from the start) Specifically in that the rules for an entirely different kind of game seem to have grown out of control.
[0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/you-know-what-neve...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
That's only sort of true.
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.
> anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun [..] The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story
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)
Basically, the true victory condition is to create a win condition that impresses the other player
(I have not read your links)
What do you mean by "solution" here?
Nothing really specific.. just some kind of of relatively tidy insight in classical terms. Game-trees, clearly articulated dominant strategies, surreal numbers.
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
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
Sounds a bit like "We Didn't Playtest This at All" (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31016/we-didnt-playtest-...), which is a lot of fun as an icebreaker game in various settings. This version has the cards prepopulated with content.
I loved that game. The developers had a Q&A once and said they legitimately did not playtest it, at all <3
Here a Youtube playlist of some people playing it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMrpfY5oU1DY79EQTQ_aD0-Ub... (using cards submitted by their viewers)
I can imagine this being useful to use as a framework when developing a new boardgame.
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.
Tried to play a free-for-all card game with blank cards with friends in a bar thirty years ago. It was too far out for the group. Writing the rules for a game during your own turn is pretty great. But if there isn't an improv idea of "and then" among the group the game won't work. It's certainly not about winning :)
An interesting example of a self-creating game where both rules and content emerge during play. Because of this, 1000 Blank White Cards feels more like a social experiment or a form of collective creativity than a traditional card game. Its flexibility and lack of rigid structure make it adaptable to very different groups of players.
Played this as a kid. Made someone eat a card whole. and so it went ok
As a kid I played something similar to this, and monetary value (A=0; J=11; Q=12; K=13) was introduced as a rule. Someone played a card they wrote on a 10 that forced me to eat a worm to destroy the card (and get $10). I never got my $10 and felt guilty for months after, and guiltier when I realized I felt guilty for eating a worm without compensation. The fact I felt I would not feel guilty otherwise confused me.
Would play again.
Me and my friends in college loved this game! Somewhere, I shill have an index card box with my (our) deck of cards. I enjoyed coming up with silly cards and drawing silly pictures :-)
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!
Whenever I play Uno - the rules always change based on the group I am playing with. This is a layer higher saying that card creation and in game rule change.
I wonder if someone has already created an app to assist card creations and make it easy to onboard people onto the game.
There's another great meta-game similar to this. You can play it alone or with friends. It doesn't require any cards or dices, although can be played with them too.
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.
This seems related to a hallucinogen-related epiphany I had once whilst hanging out with a gamer-heavy crowd 30 years ago. It's this:
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.
This seems incomplete, as in many games, one player winning does not interrupt the game. You're just first to leave the table, but others keep playing for 2nd, 3rd, and up to nth (last) place.
Fluxx is based on this.
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!
Calvinball, the card game
Not quite, this game has a mechanism for re-using rules, which is entirely forbidden in Calvinball.
I saw this and thought, Nomic for Normies
This game is a ton of fun. Try it!
Other kids' games are all such a bore! They've gotta have rules and they gotta keep score! Calvinball is better by far! It's never the same! It's always bizarre! You don't need a team or a referee! You know that it's great, 'cause it's named after me!
I had a friend who was taking this game too seriously, so I drew up a "Miriam's Plan Is Ruined!" card and snuck it into the deck.
Her plan was indeed ruined.
I feel like this is an autist's worst nightmare. There's no way I could have fun playing this!
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