1kbwc

So, I went to BarCamp on Saturday. It was a very mixed bag.

There were three presentations that stuck with me. One was a presentation entitled Living on Virtual Fish, given by Tim Howgego. Another was a presentation on “hypernumbers”, a system in development to create distributed spread sheets, compatible with Excel, hopefully, ultimately, enabling spreadsheets to read data directly from prices or other information listed on various web sites.

The last presentation I went to was a presentation on 1000 Blank White Cards(1kbwc), using the game as a metaphor for Web2.0. 1kbwc is a game in which there are very few fixed rules, and those that do exist are poorly defined. The game is also collaborative, it’s created by the players, evolving over time, changing every time it’s played.

The basic rules of 1kbwc as I see them are:

1. Make a deck:
   1. Each player provides a selection of cards they’ve created for previous games, collected from other players of previous games or created for this game. Probably on the order of 10 to 15 cards each, depending on the number of players.
   2. Some blank cards are added to the deck, making the deck consist of between a half and a third blank cards.
2. Players are dealt 4 or 5 cards as a hand.
3. Play goes to the left from the dealer, players draw a card and play a card.
4. If a player has a blank card in their hand, they may fill it in at any time.
5. Cards can have any effect they want. Some cards may be worth points.
6. When the deck runs out, the player with the most points wins.

Cards should generally have some attempt at some art on them, though this isn’t really necessary. There are probably different kinds of cards too, some of which you may play at any time (possibly in reaction to another card), some which may stay on the table in front of you or some which go straight into a discard pile, but these are never actually specified in the rules.

I’ve played this a couple times now and quite enjoyed it and have a few cards of my own I’ve created that I quite like. “Yoink!”, for example, requires nor proves any further explanation.

The problem with the first couple games I played of the game, as well as the sets of cards I’ve seen online so far is that they’re somewhat too chaotic. Many cards allocate points, but points are ultimately fairly useless, especially as the deck we were playing with contained cards that would reshuffle cards into the deck so that it would never run out, leading us to finally get bored and create cards that would just end the game. People will also introduce new kinds of points to the game, which are not used, or single cards that have no interaction with any other cards and don’t actually do anything.

There are similarities between 1kbwc and Nomic. Nomic being on the extreme side of formality in its meta-rules, 1kbwc being on the extreme side of laxity in its meta-rules, where basically anything goes. Currently, I’m wondering if there’s some middle ground to be found. I’m going to try and figure out some kind of extended set of rules for a variant on 1kbwc with better guidelines for creating cards, but leaving enough flexibility for the game to still flow smoothly from turn to turn.

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