New Player Guide

Welcome to BlogNomic! If you are a new player then this is the right place to start - it serves as an informal overview of the game and, hopefully, a one-stop shop for any questions you might need answering. Please also consider joining the Discord, where other players would be more than happy to help.

Please note that this document is relatively up to date (last revision April 2025) but, as BlogNomic is a game where the rules can change at any time, is not guaranteed to be completely current; please do check in with other players if there's anything unclear or uncertain.

The Basics

What is BlogNomic?

BlogNomic is a Nomic that is played in a blog. A Nomic is a game where changing the rules is part of the game; players can suggest changes to the rules they're playing under, and vote on whether or not to adopt those changes. BlogNomic started in 2003 and has been being played continuously ever since, but it has a structure whereby the short-term game (the 'Dynasty') resets about once a month. The blog-and-wiki format was chosen as a way to maintain an unambiguous record of the rules and proposals, and at present the game plays out such that the time commitment requires that players check in about once a day.

How do I join?

The blog has had significant issues with spammers in the past so the current sign-up process is a bit manual. The quickest way to join the game is to head to Discord and ask an admin to sign you up. If, for any reason, that isn't possible or desirable for you, you can fill in this form. Either way, we'll then set you up with a blog account, and you'll then be ready to make posts and comments on the blog. The first thing you will need to do is to make a post announcing yourself as a new player.

The wiki requires a separate account from the blog. Instructions on signing up for the wiki can be found here, but you don't have to do that on day one, it can wait until you need it.

How do I learn how to play?

BlogNomic is intimidating but there are tools that will help you get to grips with it. Firstly, when you join the game, you'll be assigned a more experienced player as a Mentor, who'll show you the ropes and answer any questions you have. This Mentoring can be quite hands-off - answering questions and providing support - or quite hands-on, in terms of providing suggestions on gameplay moves and working together to draft proposals. It is encouraged that you discuss your Mentorship with your Mentor to determine how they can support you best in the game.

Besides that, there's plenty of detail in this document and in the FAQ, the Discord is busy and generally friendly, and if you really want to deep-dive the wiki has histories of previous dynasties that you can dig into if you want to see how the game has historically been played.

How does BlogNomic work?

The game is played almost entirely through the blog and the wiki. The blog is used for proposing and voting, and the wiki houses the Ruleset and, usually, a page that is used to track the gamestate.

More details on all of this can be found in the sections below. For a new player, the most important things to understand are: how to propose and vote on the blog, what the Dynastic Rules say, and how to take an action and update the gamestate.

How do I Propose and Vote?

The core of a game of Nomic is proposing to amend the ruleset and voting on the proposals made by other players.

Proposals are made as new posts made to the blog; there is a 'New Posts' link in the sidebar, or at the bottom of the page through most mobile browsers. The new post page has a tab for categories; you will need to make sure that the 'Proposal' category is selected. Beyond that there are some stylistic conventions that are not mandatory but which are worth observing; these are detailed in "How to make a blog post" below.

Votes are cast using comments to each proposal post; the comment box has buttons above it that can be used to input the correct voting icon into a comment in progress. A player can change their vote; the most recent voting icon used is the one that is counted.

Players are encouraged to vote on every proposal and propose whenever they feel moved to do so. As a new player we'd encourage you to try proposing early on, to get a feel for it - your first proposal may not pass but that's okay, it's all a learning experience.

What are the dynastic rules?

When we start a new dynasty, there is no actual game, there's just the Core Rules telling us how to propose and vote and things, and a suggested narrative theme from the Emperor.

A dynasty starts with the players proposing some basic structure that fits that theme. If it's a dynasty about space pirates, maybe we all have an amount of cargo, or a ship on a grid map, or a list of crimes against our name, or all of these things.

Once we have a few game variables, and a way to make decisions to change those variables, a game starts to emerge. Over time, this gets more complicated, and after a while someone will suggest a victory condition ("the winner is the first player to amass $10m worth of cargo") - if a majority agree to vote that into the ruleset, the game continues with everyone working towards that goal, until somebody wins.

The specifics of the current dynasty may differ - this document isn't updated regularly enough to be able to claim to be current on that question. Your mentor or the other players will certainly be able to help, however.

How do I do stuff?

Most dynasties usually play out on some sort of wiki page, with actions being taken by editing that page directly. In general, if the ruleset explicitly says you can do something, you can do it by editing the wiki page, provided you follow any other associated instructions.

Less commonly, dynasties can also have players submitting secret orders directly to the Emperor, or performing actions by posting entries or comments to the blog.

If we're tracking players' scores on a wiki page and you want to take an action that's just described as "a player may spend 10 coins at any time to gain 1 score", you can just update the wiki page to set your coins and score to their new values. The wiki page's history tab allows players to see all the actions that have been taken.

More Detail

The structure of the ruleset

The Ruleset is the master document that tells players exactly how to play the game. It is definitive - if any instruction in any place contradicts the Ruleset then the Ruleset takes precedence. It is divided into four sections - the Core Rules (which are the basic ground rules for making proposals and voting on them), the Dynastic Rules (which are the ones that change from round to round, and have a different genre theme each round), the Building Block Rules (some Core-ish mechanics which we sometimes disable and enable between dynasties) and the Appendix (which does what you'd expect, defining a few terms in more detail and clarifying some nitpicking details).

The Core Rules, Building Blocks and Appendices are fairly detailed, as they need to be watertight, but they don't tend to change much - when we play a round of BlogNomic, we just create and alter the Dynastic Rules. If we want to change something about the Core Rules for a single round (maybe we want to say that certain players have a special double-vote on proposals) we can write a Dynastic Rule that overrules the Core Rules.

The annotated ruleset has some notes about why particular rules are important, or are written the way they are. You should try to familiarise yourself with the ruleset - the rules are at the core of every action taken by the players - but you aren't expected to learn them completely and immediately before playing. On a day to day basis understanding the Dynastic Rules is sufficient for play.

The basic process the Core Rules describe can be summarised (without meaning to be exhaustive) as:-

Players

• BlogNomic has players, who have to follow the rules. All of the players are signed-up members of the BlogNomic blog, allowing them to make and comment on blog posts. Some of the players have the role of admin, and it's their job to process proposals and do other housekeeping tasks.
• Players can go idle if they want to leave the game or take a break from it; this takes them out of play, and they can come back later. (If you don't post a comment for seven whole days, we'll assume you aren't playing any more and will set you idle automatically.)

Dynasties and gameplay

• Each round of BlogNomic is a dynasty, and has a separate theme (like "zombies" or "the Odyssey"). When somebody wins the game, we start a new dynasty and that player gets to pick the new theme. They get to be in charge of the new round, as its Emperor (although we use a theme-specific terms for Player and Emperors each dynasty, such as the Emperor being "CEO" and players "Employees").
• 

  Example gamestate from the The First Dynasty of Habanero
  Game information (such as scores, wealth, magic items or whatever else the current dynasty is about) is usually tracked on a shared wiki page, which any player can edit when the rules allow them to.
• If somebody thinks they've won the game (there will typically be a way to win defined in the dynastic rules somewhere), they can post a declaration of victory to announce this. The game is paused while players discuss and vote on whether they think the win was legal. If enough players vote on it, then the declaring player is recognised as the dynasty's winner: we erase the dynastic rules and begin a new dynasty with that player as its Emperor.

Proposals

An example proposal from The Sixth Dynasty of JonathanDark. The blog post suggests an edit to an existing rule, and players discuss it and cast votes in the comments below.

If you want to make a proposal to change the rules, you post it to the blog as a blog entry, describing the exact changes you want to make. Other players can then discuss your proposal in comments, and vote on it by pressing the and buttons (or if they want to defer to the Emperor). If a player changes their mind, they can change their vote by casting a new one.

• As soon as the oldest proposal on the blog has a quorum of votes in favour of it (defined as over half the players), it enacts, and we update the ruleset accordingly. The proposal can also enact if, after a full 48 hours of voting, most voters were in favour.
• If that proposal gets enough votes against it that it couldn't (without some of those against voters changing their votes) reach quorum, it instead fails and nothing happens. The oldest proposal also fails if the player who made the proposal decides to withdraw it, or if 48 hours pass and there wasn't a majority in favour.
• The Emperor can vote to veto a proposal to block it from being enacted, if they feel strongly about it.
• Proposals are processed in a queue - it's always the oldest one that passes or fails before the others - so that we know what order everything is going to happen in.
• Each player can have up to two proposals up for voting at a time.
• You can reword your own proposal for half an hour after posting it, or until someone votes on it, whichever happens first.

Calls for Judgement

• If players disagree about the interpretation of the rules, they can raise a call for judgement (CfJ) for everyone to vote on. This is a special type of proposal which can be passed more quickly, ignoring the queue.

Winning

The language that BlogNomic uses for winning a round is 'Achieving Victory'. By both rule and convention, that language is fairly strictly the only way to win or to permit someone to win - which is to say, you can only win if you have done something that the Ruleset says means you have Achieved Victory. Players consider there to be three main paths to Achieving Victory in BlogNomic - conventional gameplay, scams, and pooling.

Conventional gameplay means performing the actions, as written in the ruleset, better than anyone else, until you meet the stated criteria for Achieving Victory.

Scamming is when a player exploits an unexpected loophole in the ruleset to suddenly achieve the victory condition by making some move that their opponents didn't expect, but which the ruleset technically allows, or to create a victory condition that didn't necessarily exist beforehand. All of this is equally valid - the game of Nomic is all about the writing and obeying of rules, and a clever scam is as admirable as a clever move-by-move win.

Pooling is when a group of players pool their resources and their actions to magnify their effect. This often results in the co-operating players randomly selecting a victor from amongst their number.

How to make a blog post

From the Blognomic home page, click 'Make a New Post', under your username in the sidebar. This link should take you to a form with various fields. These largely explain themselves; 'Title' is the title of the post, 'URL Title' is the title of the URL of the post, which you probably shouldn't touch, 'Body' is the main body of the post. The 'Commentary or flavour text' box under 'Body' is for explanatory text to proposals, which will not be binding if the proposal is enacted; the 'Admin' box is for admins, and you shouldn't touch it. The buttons at top right are 'Preview', 'Quick save', and 'Submit'. (Do not use the 'Quick save' button; it doesn't work as expected and will publish your blog entry to the blog.) In the body of the page, you can use basic HTML, including links, italic/bold/underlines, and block quotes.

If you are making a Proposal or a Call for Judgement, make sure that you set the correct category. Do this by clicking 'Categories' above the 'Title' field, and selecting the correct item from the list. Do not preface your title with 'Proposal: ' or 'Call for Judgement: '; this is done automatically if you select the category correctly.

If you're creating or amending a rule, which you usually will be, then it's common practice to use the <blockquote> tag to mark the text you're adding or altering. For example.

Create a new rule entitled 'Rule Name', containing the following:

<blockquote>rule text here</blockquote>

or

Replace the section of Rule 'Rule Name' that reads

<blockquote>old rule text here</blockquote>

with the text

<blockquote>new rule text here</blockquote>

How to play well

A survey of players in 2012 asked current and past players "What can the player base at large do to ensure that dynasties are more fun in general?". Some of those answers bear repeating here:-

• "Vote FOR for Proposals (that are not scammable) if you think they'll make the game more interesting. Propose a lot."
• "Be creative to help build the game."
• "Make more proposals and tell the Emperor about problems with the dynasty."
• "Participate and share ideas"
• "Participate, give feedback, try and make things work before doing anything else."
• "Rules. I for one don't come up with many great ideas, but this game is built on its rules. People should try to at least start discussions about future mechanics they think would be fun, and maybe someone else can figure out a way to work it into the current rules."
• "Support, encourage, and instruct new players; propose rule changes to create a game you think is fun; accept that other players might have different ideas of fun, or have different goals in playing than you do;"
• "Be bold enough to propose repealing or changing any rule that seems boring. Make some noise if it's getting quiet. Encourage interaction. Keep any rivalry in-character."
• "Take part of the dynasty. And if they are not enjoying it, make proposals to fix the parts they don't enjoy."

Some essays on BlogNomic gameplay are "Beginner's Strategy Guide", "How and Why to Write Proposals" and "On the role of Argumentation in Nomic".

Players are also encouraged to read and uphold the Community Guidelines.

Common proposal pitfalls

Watch out for the few mistakes that everyone makes:-

• Put your proposal in the "proposal" blog category. You don't have to type "Proposal:" at the start of the proposal title, the blog does that automatically - you instead have to put it in the Proposal category by clicking the Categories tab when you're writing it, and selecting "Proposal". This allows the blog to automate things a bit and put a link to it in the sidebar. It's easy to forget to do this, and the post won't be a legal proposal without it. (If you notice within fifteen minutes and nobody's voted on it, then you can edit the proposal to put it in the right category; if the Emperor notices within six hours then they can also step in and fix it. After those windows close, though, per Rule 1.7, para 3, it is illegal to change the category, and you'll have to make a new post instead.)
• Remember you can only have two proposals pending at once. Even if you've withdrawn your first proposal because something was wrong with it, it still counts as "pending" until it's actually failed by an admin.
• If you want to create a new rule, say that explicitly. If you want your proposal to have a continuing effect on gameplay, you should explicitly state that it creates a new rule, and what the text and title of the rule are. (If you don't, the proposal will just happen once and then have no further effect.) Likewise, if you want to amend a rule, say which rule you're amending.
• You can edit after posting, but not if people have started voting. You can make changes to your proposal for half an hour after posting it, to reflect any afterthoughts or issues raised by other players, but only so long as nobody has cast a vote on it. As soon as it's received a vote, the wording locks and you aren't allowed to change it any more.