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 is to 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.
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!
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
Fluxx is cool - it’s like a more structured version of this. IIRC it does have a theoretically finite rules space, but there are many, many unique fun combinations of rules, and it feels like you’re devising your own. I highly recommend it!
I’m glad there can be no “official” (ie mass produced) version of this game. In true spirit of the game. As much as I wish we had more Calvin and Hobbes related merchandise bc I love it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
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!