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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)

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!

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.

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"

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

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!

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

This but for programmers: https://github.com/nomyx/Nomyx

Played this as a kid. Made someone eat a card whole. and so it went ok

Here a Youtube playlist of some people playing it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMrpfY5oU1DY79EQTQ_aD0-Ub... (using cards submitted by their viewers)

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.

Fluxx is based on this.

Calvinball, the card game

I feel like this is an autist's worst nightmare. There's no way I could have fun playing this!

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.