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)

> 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.

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.

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