cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/7647192
Basically, it’s a game about making and changing rules, much like actual legislative bodies. Each player proposes a new rule and the other players vote to approve it or not.
Who wins? Whoever reaches the victory condition. What’s the victory condition? That’ll depend on the rules at the time, which might change in the next turn.
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
— Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment
That concept immediately makes me think of the card game Fluxx.
I learned to play Fluxx from Andy Loony years ago. Awesome guy, funny as hell. Now I wanna find my old decks…
Edit: You ever make any Fluxx Blanks?
Yeah! Without knowing of Nomic, I designed a TTRPG about gods creating the universe by writing the rules of the game they’re playing.
It’s kinda like nomic as an RPG. Free here if you’d like to take a peek: https://alleywurds.itch.io/eroding-the-outside-a-game-of-gods
Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.
The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.
Sounds like the perfect way to get all your friends rippling with muscles
This seems super interesting and I’ve never heard of it before. Thanks for sharing!
Is this more of a table top game? I’d be interested to see it as a kind of MMO.
It’s more of a mailing list or forum game, where you can check on the state of the rules at any time.
It can be played as tabletop, but that involves a lot of handwriting, and who’s got time for that in 2023?
Someone to act as the writer while the rest of the group debates and votes should work. Imagine people then fighting over to make rules such that the writer may never type in specific words!
That’s doable… if you make it a rule!
In my experience, the game tends to get very “meta” very quickly. Someone could add a rule that “nobody write down the rules”, unless you had the “person X writes down the rules” as an immutable rule, so the moment someone wants to make it mutable… beware!
I have wanted to play in a game of this since I first heard about it, but I’ve never managed to find a group for it.
I’ve only just started looking myself, but theres agora online
https://agoranomic.org/index.html (the hamburger menu has a how to play option)
Also: https://blognomic.com/
The game of Mao begins now.
Even more unusual variants include […] a game which, instead of allowing voting on rules, splits into two sub-games, one with the rule, and one without it.
This sounds insane and delightful
That’s interesting, Disgaea has a similar mechanic present in its game called the Dark Assembly, where you basically either bribe or kill the senators to make them vote with you.
I love wikiholes that take me back to Douglas Hofstadter.
This sounds like something that would be played on The Genius, I’m all for it
