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)

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

EDIT: I've also just remembered "Numberwang", which is a similar game with supposedly complex hidden rules from the comedy TV show "That Mitchell and Webb Look", where the players have to pick a number until they choose one that is "Numberwang"

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

Playtest with your co-authors and let anyone create and use novel cards/actions during the game. Do it with an intention to create some consistant, balanced game in the end, so maybe avoid adding too-out-of-the-box stuff.

I wonder if someone has already created an app to assist card creations and make it easy to onboard people onto the game.

The rules we used were... we had a deck of index cards and we dealt them out, I think 7 each, and the deck was face-down in the center. On your turn, you'd draw a card, then play a card. If you had a blank card in your hand, you could create your own card, usually we'd have some time before starting the game to draw some.

It was very fun, especially fun to see what cards were being played and then creating one as a direct reaction to it!

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.

Her plan was indeed ruined.