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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Fluxx is based on this.

Calvinball, the card game