Mini Mao

Introduction

Mini Mao is a simple but rapidly-inflating card game for three or more players, in which the winner of each round is allowed to add a new rule to the game. All such rules are kept as closely-guarded secrets, however, and their effects must be deduced by the other players through observation and experimentation.

Mini Mao is a cut-down version of Mao - it's a great deal friendlier to new players, without losing too much of the mystery, superstition, deduction or paranoia. The basic game idea is very easy to remember, and you can teach someone to play in a couple of minutes. (I realise that some will regard that sentence as foul heresy, but shall explain later.)

Setting up

To play Mini Mao, you'll need a deck of cards. Standard poker cards are probably best, but the game works with anything - a Tarot deck, Magic the Gathering cards, a pile of (varied) business cards, or whatever you feel like using.

Decks with a couple of cards missing or bent are fine. Leave the jokers in or take them out, it doesn't matter.

Initial Rules

The initial rules of Mini Mao are extremely simple. Players take turns one after another, proceeding clockwise, and each turn they may either:-

• Play a card - They choose a card from their hand and put it on top of the play pile, face up.
• Pass - Instead of playing a card, they draw one from the top of the draw pile. (Usually you only pass if you can't play a card.)

The first player to empty their hand wins the game!

Secret Rules

The initial rules are, of course, absurd - if players can play any card from their hand, everyone will just play a card at a time until the first player's hand is empty.

But Mao has secret, unwritten rules. These rules are made up at the start of each round by the previous round's winner, and take the form of simple restrictions, side-effects or alterations to play. Some random examples might be:-

• Players cannot play a card on top of a card of the same number.
• Diamonds can only be followed by hearts.
• Anyone playing a five must shout 'Bang!'
• If someone plays an eight, everyone must pass their hand to the right.
• Players can play ascending runs of consecutive number cards all in one go.
• Players can also win the game by building up a hand containing at least six cards, all of them hearts.

The standard penalty for breaking a rule is that the offender takes back their illegal play, and draws a "penalty" card from the draw pile. (So in the second example above, if someone tried to play a club on top of a diamond, then they'd have to take their card back, and draw a penalty card. It would then be the next player's turn.)

Secret rules are policed by the player who invented them - once you've invented a rule, it's up to you to make sure that nobody breaks it, and to prompt transgressors to take their move back and draw a penalty card.

When inventing a secret rule, try to keep it simple and fair - an excessively complicated rule ("You can't play an even red card on an odd black one, unless the second-previous card was of the same suit, or the turn number is prime") won't ever be guessed, and you'll probably forget the precise wording of it anyway, and a blatantly abusive one ("The creator of this rule automatically wins every round! And everyone has to give them money!") just means that your friends won't want to play Mini Mao with you again.

Jargon

For each secret rule, its inventor must also come up with a piece of jargon to cover that rule - usually just a verb or a noun to use when the rule is broken or invoked.

Jargon is useful to clarify which rule has been broken, when a particular player has won several rounds and has several rules in effect. At the arguable price of making rules easier to deduce, it's very useful for keeping the game intact - you might call a Gronk by mistake, and a third player (who's worked out what causes a Gronk) will be able to challenge it, rather than assuming that a different rule has been broken.

The choice of jargon can also serve as a useful aide-memoire for policing a rule, if you choose something (however obscurely) connected with its effect. And it's also good for impressing or confusing an external audience - an evolving Mao game is fairly indistinguishable from a normal, massively-elaborate card game, if players are careful how they word things.

Playing the Game

To begin; shuffle the deck, and deal five cards to each player.

Place the leftover cards face-down in the middle of the table - this is the draw pile.

Select a player to make up the secret rule for the first round. You can choose the person randomly, or go with the first player to think of one.

When a secret rule has been invented, everyone picks their hands of cards up. The top card of the draw pile is placed face-up on the table, to form the play pile.

Play then begins with the player on the inventor's left, and continues clockwise until someone successfully empties their hand and wins. The deck is then shuffled back together for a new round, and the winner gets to make up a secret rule for the next round. (Note that this new rule operates in addition to the secret rule from the previous round - the game gets more and more complicated as it progresses.)

The game itself continues until it locks up, or until the players have been driven insane. If you've got to the point where the rules aren't being very interesting, or where two of them are interacting in a particularly nasty way, then you can either agree to delete the offending rules or (more simply, and probably more wisely, so that people don't have to backtrack their mental map of the game) just start a fresh game from scratch.

Example Game

Aleric, Boris and Colin are playing a new game of Mini Mao. It has been decided that Boris will invent the first rule. (And that whenever they speak in bold, it means they're playing a card.)

Jokers and Aces

If your deck includes any cards which don't comfortably fit the usual criteria of other cards, you can refer to them as jokers (perhaps they are jokers) - they can be played as if they were a copy of any other card from the deck; the player calls a card when they play it.

If you're playing with a poker deck, be sure to agree whether aces are high or low; ideally before the game. You can make their highness or lowness part of the secret rules ("Number cards cannot be played onto higher number cards, and aces are low for the purposes of this rule."), but it can get confusing if two rules treat them differently.

Mini Mao began when I was killing time with some friends and a deck of poker cards in 2002, and, on the subject of games with hidden rules, I vaguely recalled Mao - but only that it was a Bartok variant, with secret rules and no initial ones (not even suit progression). We played a dozen or so games of it like that, starting a new batch of rules whenever we got bored, and it worked.

Checking for "official" Mao rules online when I got back near a computer, though, I found that they were actually quite elaborate - standard Mao can be regarded as an already-begun game of Mini Mao, where the game so far has already been played for a dozen or so rounds by some Californians you don't know. It forces you to play a certain type of game, with suit progression and number-effects, and doesn't seem to encourage "rebooting".

Mini Mao is just a crystallisation of the rule-making, rule-breaking and rule-meshing aspects, putting the first rule-maker only one rung above everyone else, and making the game a lot more personal for those playing it.

And it's a much better game to introduce to new people, particularly if you're the only one who's played it before. The world needs more games that you can explain in three minutes and play for hours, with a single deck of any old cards.