The Art of the Scam

The scam is, culturally, perhaps the single mechanic that is most conceptually inextricable from BlogNomic as a game. It is, however, largely only passively understood, intuitive to those attuned to the mechanism, obscure to those blindsided by it. Attempts have been made to either protect against or deny scams by proposal, usually floundering on the problem of definition - that none has ever articulated a clear concept of what a scam is. This suits the scammers, whose craft is inherently tied to surprise, but it serves newer players particularly poorly and, at times, contributes to an anything-goes looseness that can undermine the essential fabric of the conventional game. Besides all that, though, it is simply the case that if one wishes to understand BlogNomic then one must, at some point, grapple with the scam. Understanding the scam as a craft, a social contract, and a design challenge is essential to understanding what makes the game distinctive.

This essay considers the scam as it exists in BlogNomic as a whole; the history, the cultural context, the unwritten rules. I hope that it is of some use. Josh (talk) 11:02, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

What Is a Scam?

BlogNomic uses the term "scam" in a manner somewhat distinct from its conventional usage in English. In BlogNomic, a scam is the act of exploiting an unexpected loophole in the ruleset to suddenly achieve a given outcome, usually victory, in a way that is not intuitive to a straightforward reading of the rules, rather than winning through conventional gameplay.

As a definition, that sounds a bit like cheating, but it is not. The first sentence of the ruleset mandates that all players must obey the ruleset, and any scam that didn't meet that criteria would fail on contact. A scam must be legal under the rules as written. Baked into the fabric of Nomic is the knowledge that, if the rest of the players disapprove of your move, they can simply reject it by proposal; a scam must, therefore, first and foremost be convincing, and legal legitimacy is key to that. Successful scams are exploitations, not violations; the target is a sea of begrudging FOR votes and a faintly irritated round of applause, not a swift CfJ putting you back to square one, or even punishing you for your impunity.

The scam sits at the heart of what Nomic is, in terms of is central metaphor: a game about law and politics, where the exploitation of systems is an unavoidable side effect of having the systems in the first place. To paraphrase: it takes a million to get you sent to prison, and a million to get you a house in the sticks. The line between the two outcomes is not always clear and distinct.

A Taxonomy of Scams

Here are some common types of scam, and some examples of where they have been successfully applied.

The Found Scam

The scammer discovers an unintended gap in the ruleset, often one nobody noticed slipping through during voting, and exploits it. There are some sub-types:

The Text-Injection Scam

A perineal favourite: desiring the creativity of player input, a ruleset allows participants to directly add free text to the gamestate or ruleset, a power that is used to create the conditions for victory. For example, The Second Dynasty of Habanero, in which a player was allowed to freely name a mineral with the name of the victory condition.

The Brute-Force Attack

Some dynasties create unexplored space between mechanics that can create positive feedback loops when carried out in bulk. This was successfully exploited in The First Dynasty of Jumble, where a player calculated a path to victory that required 6,000 actions to be carried out in sequence - which, because BlogNomic allows multiple actions to be concatenated into a single update, they then did.

Inheritance Scams

Comparatively rare, but devastating: exploiting leftover rules from a previous dynasty, usually at the beginning of the next. The Seventh Dynasty of Kevan fell victim to this, as did The Sixth Dynasty of Josh, although that latter example was more of a controlled risk.

The Forced Scam

The scammer writes the loophole themselves, disguising it as innocent rule text and hoping no one spots it during voting. This is arguably the most skillful form — requiring foresight, patience, and the ability to write convincing-but-exploitable language.Example: in The First Dynasty of coppro, the key to the scam was that a newly created corporation could act immediately and then be disbanded and recreated without ill effects — a loophole the scammer had deliberately introduced into the ruleset themselves.

The Timing / Admin Scam

Any player can make use of the interaction between distinct timing clauses to find windows where the rules don't interact in a way that was anticipated. Admins have a mechanical advantage over non-admin players in this regard, because the biggest timing impact in the game is when proposals are enacted and the rules are changed, and admins possess the power to either act before enacting a proposal or immediately after. A famous example: in The Eighth Dynasty of Kevan, a player deliberately enacted a "create a new rule" proposal in a legal but perverse way that added the new rule at the start of the ruleset rather than the end, changing the rule numbers and causing a later fix proposal — which referenced a rule only by number — to fizzle with no effect.

The Ethics and Etiquette of Scamming

As a whole, the BlogNomic community is ambivalent about scams. Officially they are tolerated; there has never been a serious attempt to ban them outright that looked like passing. But the community has clearly developed norms around them, and there is strong resistance to the idea of a scam that significantly derails gameplay.

This culture shifts with time, based on who is playing and, in particular, who the Emperor is. The Imperial Styles system formalises this: Emperors can declare themselves "Scam-Averse", signalling not just their own hostility to scams but also a preference that players avoid scamming in that dynasty. The strength of that prohibition is weak, as the extent of Imperial influence over the chaotic and willful BlogNomic player-base can be fitful at best, but there are players who will only play in a scam-averse imperial dynasty, in the hopes that scamming will be less of a factor.

In general, a scam is most likely to be accepted when it leads to victory. A scam attempted too early, when it cannot be converted into a win, or too frivolously, when it can't generate a meaningful output, can create hostility in the rest of the player cohort and often poisons the well for later scams in that dynasty. It also burns conventional gameplay: if a game mechanic's value has been corrupted by a scam, players will be unwilling to build on it. The scam essentially prevents future development of that mechanic. There is a social expectation that players make sure that their scams are clean - either decisive, or resolvable in a way that doesn't foul up the gamestate on an ongoing basis.

A scam only truly succeeds if the community would vote FOR it, either at a resulting Declaration of Victory or at a CfJ upholding its effects. This adds a social factor to the legitimacy of scams that can be hard to predict. For example, in The First Dynasty of Alecto, a player's scam was disputed, but the dynasty had been so quiet that the victory was accepted anyway. Community mood at the time of the scam matters as much as the technical validity.

Finally, it is important to have regard for the core rules boundary. It has not always been the case that the core rules have been off-limits for scams, but it currently is, and that is a hard prohibition, both legally and socially. The ruleset explicitly prohibits using Core or Building Blocks rules scams to win, and while those clauses may themselves be scammable, the community would be unlikely to tolerate any attempt. Like all rules in BlogNomic, this is not immutable; in The Eighth Dynasty of Brendan, a text injection scam was used to hijack authorial power over the entire ruleset, but this was permitted on the grounds that the acting player was trusted.

Scam Resistance and the Arms Race

The ruleset of BlogNomic is shaped by scams. Every time the game is disrupted by a scam, the ruleset is changed to adapt to the disruption, and over time this has accreted to the point where a non-negligible percentage of the core and appendix rules are focused on preventing or foiling specific scams.

This creates a paradox: every scam-prevention measure adds rule complexity, which creates new surface area for future scams. To some extent, the prohibition on core and appendix rule scams has blunted that paradox, but the core rules prohibition is also semi-cultural. It is possible to imagine that a bold wild west era of core rules scams lies in the future, which would likely lead to the ruleset being slimmed back down again to compensate.

An annotated history of the ruleset would reveal the secret pattern of scams that have shaped it. As an exercise, the reader is invited to consider the rule Fair Play, or the appendix items Gamestate Tracking or Clarifications. At the time of writing, the core and appendix rulesets combined are nearly 11,000 words in length; those three rules, which in their entirety are responses to earlier scams, actual or anticipated, account for over 40% of that total.

Scamming has always been an arms race: players find new and novel ways to break the ruleset, and players try to anticipate those breakages and plug the leaks, pre-emptively or after the fact. The best defence against scams is and always has been the community's collective memory. Experienced players scan proposals for loopholes partly because they've seen (or committed) similar ones before.

Scam Design as a Craft

Scams are more likely to succeed if they are elegant. If the audience appreciates the move then they are more likely to vote for it, even if the move doesn't completely hold up to robust scrutiy (see, for example, the victory in The First Dynasty of Tantusar, whose validity has come to be reconsidered in recent years). But what makes a scam elegant versus inelegant? Here are some elements to consider:

• Irreversibility. As discussed above, the best scams are decisive moves. An elegant scam is one that can't be simply reversed by CfJ; it needs to establish its post-hoc reality so emphatically that reversal is either inconceivable or fully impossible.
• Concealment. An elegant scam should be a surprise to everyone except the performer. The dynastic history is littered with examples of scams that were spiked or co-opted because the performer didn't veil their hand enough - for example, the Gin Goggles scam in The Twenty-Sixth Dynasty of Kevan. The other risk that that the scammer is simply extorted, such as in The Seventh Dynasty of ais523. Note that there there are cases where a proposal comes up that closes a loophole; a successful scammer will always ignore the temptation to utilise the loophole while the proposal is pending.
• Timing. When designing proposals, players often pay strict attention to timing windows. This is because landing a scam in a timing window is a big flex - and the tighter the window, the harder it is to object to. In the earlier years of the game it was quite common for players to set middle-of-the-night alarm clocks to make use of five-minute windows; The First Dynasty of Cayvie was decided when the winning cabal managed to maintain a complete lock on the game for several days through careful management of timing intervals.
• Feasibility. Does the scam require unusual resources or admin powers, or is it available to any player? The greater the extent to which a scam was technically available to anyone, the more likely it is to be considered elegant by the rest of the players; admin advantage scams are very begrudgingly accepted but always cause a simmer of resentment when they arise.
• Chaff. A scam that was overt and not well timed, but which was well concealed by other, unrelated activity, is often considered elegant; the conclusion of The Seventh Dynasty of ais523 showcased the kind of attention manipulation needed to hide a scam in plain sight.

Conclusion: Why the Scam Matters

The author of this piece is an admitted fan of the scam. Scams can be seen as a disruptive impediment but the truth is that scamming is an essential element of the act of co-creation in which we are all engaged. Scams reveal and shape the ruleset, and scams are one of the things that keeps proposal-writing consequential. If rules had no exploitable edges, voting would be purely aesthetic, and the game would be a solipsistic, academic exercise.

A game that has run for 20+ years and still produces novel scams is evidence that the ruleset space is genuinely vast and creative.

The scam is a shared tradition, an essential thread in the history of the game. Even players who lose to them often describe the experience with admiration. It is, in a sense, BlogNomic's version of the brilliant move in chess, or having your full house cracked by a royal flush in poker: something you wish hadn't happened to you, but can feel some sense of pleasure at having been present to see it happen. Conventional play wins you dynasties, but scamming shapes the game, and in many ways provides the longer-lasting legacy.