Rules

So, I'm going to be completely honest here and say that what my original thought was for this project was to just turn nothing in at all and call it a day.  However I figured that you've probably had a million students do that over the years and so it would probably be tiresome, plus it wouldn't really do anything to help me at all, so I decided to actually do a real project.

My first thoughts were once again to do some sort of board game, because when you think about it, board games are the easiest way to watch people and rules communicate.  Essentially people read the rule book, follow it, and try to have fun following these rules set before them.  What I thought I'd do was try to make a game where the players can actively change the rules as part of the game.

Of course, I decided to do a little research to see if this had already been done before, and sure enough it has been.  Twice.  The first one is a game called "Nomic" which was created by a philosopher in the 80s, it's very intellectual, very complicated, but also it's supposedly one of the most thought-provoking and satisfying games out there.  The second game is a card game called Fluxx, which in order to win, you have to play cards that change the rules, win conditions, etc.  I've played this game once and it's incredibly fun though it's extremely random and limited in how you change the rules, since you can only change the rules in a way that the cards let you.

Now the game I created is kind of a happy medium between the two.  It's not as complex as Nomic and not quite as simple as Fluxx.  I don't have a name for it yet, so we'll just call it "The Rules Game" to make it easier.  The components are simple, you just need a pen/marker and a handful of post-it notes/notecards.

You start with five notecards already written out with five rules.  These rules are as follows:

0. All players must play by the rules.
1. Rule 0 must not be changed or removed.
2. All rules must have their own unique number.  When proposing a rule, you must include the number.  All rules must be initialed by the player who created them.
3. All players must agree to all rules, changes to existing rules, the addition of rules, and the removal of all rules.
4. No rule change can have any sort of retro-active effect.
5. Play proceeds counter-clockwise.
6. On a player's turn they are allowed to do one of the following:
   - Propose a new rule
   - Propose a change to an existing rule
   - Propose to remove a rule.
7. Oldest person playing goes first.

So that's pretty much it.  It's extremely fun with a group of three-four people.  It never ends well though.  If you're paying attention, you'll notice that if you manage to change rule 1, you can then change rule 0 which makes things ... interesting to say the least. (It happened to us)

Now then I'm going to turn this in through Oncourse and also email it to you, because you explicitly told us not to email you any assignments and that's just the kind of guy I am.  Cheers.