One of the primary results--obvious to programmers but perhaps not obvious to the general public--is how easy it is for rules to interact in unexpected ways, often producing ambiguous gameplay which may go unnoticed by players for significant lengths of time.
Playing it with Mathematicians/CS types is brain-hurty (think mod-13 arithmetic and prime numbered cards behaving differently).
---
[1] Some of the different rules:
- If you ask a question, you get a 1 card penalty
- If you have one card and don't say "bartok", you get your hand made back up to 7.
- We played with a bunch of broken decks all smushed together, so you couldn't count cards.
I know it puts me firmly in the Mathematicians/CS types corner, but when I read that, I did not even have to think consciously to have 'once you are in Z13, prime numbers should not bother you anymore' spring up in my mind.
For those not Mathematicians/CS types: modulo 13 arithmetic does not have primes. For example, 2 is not prime because 3 times 5 equals 2 mod 13, 3 is not prime because it equals 4 times 4 (and, by extension, -4 times -4, which is 9 times 9), etc.
The rules went something like: when you play 'X', then all cards are incremented by 1. Kings are 13 and wrap around to Ace, which is 1.
The second rule would have been, say, all primes are spades, so King + 2 would be 2, which is prime. King of clubs on a three of hearts... perfectly legit.