Thoughts On Nomic In General

Thoughts On The Game After Having Played A Few In Person Nomics And Some Weeks of Blognomic

Nomic is quite a niche game and while finding players for certain tabletop games, from board games to pen and paper games may be difficult, finding people who want to try any form of Nomic can be more difficult. The fact that the average person or even average tabletop enthusiast does not know what Nomic is in my opinion has to do with the inherent way the game was created and introduced to the world.

Since Nomic was introduced in an essay from the magazine Scientific American, it's initial audience was not widely from a background of playing games or knew anyone working in the industry of board games. Because Nomic was freely distributed it lacked any chance of gaining a lot of lasting publicity. Other free tabletop games do exist, but they are generally tied with some sort of equipment, crazy 8s, go fish, bullshit, poker, black jack and so on are all either ways of getting people to buy cards or for betting. Mao is quite similar to Nomic but it also suffers from low popularity and the fact that it requires a deck of cards to play with. Many other board games obviously require the present equipment to play. The difference that Nomic has with all of these games is that it's not as bound to require equipment to play, although such objects can make games more fun or familiar to play. So Nomic won't ever get support from a Hasbro as a board or card game because its main mechanic will become overly complicated for the average person buying it and it's more effort for them to market a ruleset and pieces that can turn into any game than an already complete game -- their potential customers want to pay them for a game, not the pieces and information to make a game!

There seems to be two major ways of having changes to the ruleset work without breaking the game -- having the game in a state that from the initial ruleset the first person to propose a change can simply win from making the change "I win" or making it impossible to change the rules. The most familiar to people here is using proposals. Methods similar to proposals have changes stated about the rules or something in the game which are not rules (known here as the gamestate) which are then decided by majority vote. Another method is for the person suggesting the change to be able to make that change without any objection from the other player or players. This second option allows for two player games (instead of having the two players vote against any changes so nothing happens) leads to a lot of padding to the rules to either prevent someone from doing something like "The player named X wins" or prevent them from erasing all of the rules. Usually the player is limited by time, such as only being able to change the rule when they have a specific state; another way is to allow people to make limited changes so you can do (almost) anything. In a two player game the players will balance it out with interleaved opportunities at changing the ruleset and or gamestate. One way of limiting power is usually with immutable rules or other such similar schemes.

How fun a board game is to each player depends upon how the other players interact with the game; if a half the people at the table don't enjoy playing said game then the mood at the table turns sour. This fact is simply increased with games with interactive story telling such as RPGs or Nomic. If people don't "get" Nomic the first rule they may try to implement would be some victory condition that would immediately end the game. When you can make trivial victory conditions such as "the first person to speak wins" the idea of wining can be boring. Without a challenge, winning ceases to be fun -- as an aside most boardgames or even player versus player video games makes winning something to desire by comparing skill or some similar thing: winning a game of ratscrew is more fun or enjoyable than winning a game of war against someone, however it depends upon your opponent. Ratscrew against a paraplegic or similarly disabled player is about as fun as playing war against yourself.