Nomic: a game in which changing the rules is a move

en.wikipedia.org

22 points·TriinT··9 comments

Some friends and I played a game of Riskopoly. It lasted many hours, but was quite fun and interesting. Here is one variation of rules: http://www.gilwood.org/riskopoly.htm

The deals we did quickly spiraled out of control and we needed post it notes to keep track of all of them. Cease fires, profit sharing, time sharing, army loaning, all sorts of craziness.

Monopoly and Risk are my two favorite games. This variant combining the two sounds incredible. Ingenious!

We had a game of Monopoly that inadvertently led to this once we allowed combined onwership on a property group (or at least people giving the group to one owner in exchange for 1/3rd rent). By the end one player had permanent immunity everywhere but no properties and most had various 1/18th shares of rent coming in...

We used to play this game at philosophy group meetings as an undergraduate. Very fun. My favorite laws involved spelling words backward.

Having mutating rules is a pretty organic and dynamic game design idea. One other game that does this really well is called Fluxx: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxx

I've often thought about how games could be used as a sort of simulator for political ideas. This seems very interesting, especially in that context.

my son likes to change the rules during games ... "if you do that move that means I won" ...

the discussion one year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203683

Calvinball comes to mind as a perfect example of a nomic game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes#Calvinball

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