Friday Night Shots – Breaking a Game Intentionally – Why?

It’s weird what you can find on the Boardgame Geek forums sometimes.

Usually it’s rules questions or reviews or comments about a game in a game’s forum on the site.

Many times, those rules questions would be quickly answered if they’d either do a cursory search or, I don’t know, READ THE FUCKIN’ RULEBOOK!

Anyway, that’s not what tonight’s post is about.

Occasionally there will be a post in a game’s forum that asks a question that nobody rational would ever have thought of.

It basically amounts to “what if all players did some thing that’s in the rulebook in such a stupid manner that the game state would never change and the game would never end?”

The game in question this time is Dnup, a card game from the designer of Scout that is actually brilliant.

In this game, you are trying to shed all of your cards from your hand.

You do that by playing a sequence of numbers, either a set of the same number or a run, to the table.

However, to play a sequence with the same number of cards as somebody else has already played, it has to be higher than that sequence.

If you do, those cards go back into the player’s hand.

Or, you can add a card to somebody else’s sequence, which could result in all of that happening as well.

Or you can just pick up somebody’s sequence, which might make your hand better.

The last thing you can do is rotate the cards in your hand.

That’s where this stupid question comes in.

I’ll quote the post in question just so you can see it in its entirety:

“Surely, I’m assuming something wrong here, the thing is that the rulebook does not specify what happens if all players choose to perform the action of rotating all cards in hand. I understand this action opens space to wait until interesting cards are on the table. However, what if other players realise of this strategy and intentionally choose to perform action D endlessly?”

What the fuck?

So this person is saying that four players around a table may all just rotate their hands endlessly and never actually start the game?

Player A rotates

Player B rotates

Player C rotates

Player D rotates

Player A rotates (back to the way it was originally)

Player B rotates

Player C rotates

Player D rotates

Player A says “hey, this is boring. Do you want to play another game instead?”

And they expect the rulebook to have a specific rule in it about this situation, maybe stating that the first player then has to actually play something?

How about a rule stating that if everybody around the table is a dumbass, they should all just go home and wallow in their dumbassery?

That’s like wondering why the rulebook for Terraforming Mars doesn’t say what should happen if every player passes as their first action.

I guess you’ll eventually be swimming in money!

But who’s having fun with this?

Why would designers think that this would be an issue, enough to actually have a rule about it?

You know what I would say to somebody who asks this question?

Don’t play with assholes.

One of the responses to this question on BGG actually references my post (well, not references, but they say the same thing I said): they’re not playing to win, so why are you playing with them?

A corollary to that post then comes to mind: if you’re not playing to actually advance the game state, are you really playing?

Of course, a lot of games don’t have this problem because they have a set number of rounds or actions in the game.

If you wasted an action or did nothing in the round, that doesn’t matter.

The game is progressing anyway.

This is more of a thing in games where players completely determine when the game is going to end.

It just boggles my mind, though.

Why would anybody play a game where nobody wants to actually do anything?

Can you answer me that?

I’m not going to dwell on this too much. Just a quick Friday night post.

Can you believe this crap?

What do you think of it?

Let me know in the comments.