Me and my mates were just sitting around one day and came up with a game which we eventually called the tub game. Man, it was hillarious and it went on for ages. In the end everything became part of the game and the rules just got made up as we went along. As you can imagine, it got boring eventually, but it was a whole lot of fun while it lasted

We thought the game was our little silly thing, but damn, I’ve just stumbled across Nomic;

Nomic is a game I (Peter Suber) invented in 1982. It’s a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves.

From wikipedia:

The game is in some ways modeled on modern government systems, and demonstrates that any rule-changing system can get into a situation in which the laws are contradictory or insufficient to determine what is legal. Because the game models (and exposes conceptual questions about) a legal system and the problems of legal interpretation, it is named after νόμος (nomos), Greek for “law”.

A meta-game. Yay! I love this stuff man, it’s the tub game cubed! It’s massively popular too and taken really seriously, with some games going on for years.

Now, off to find some unsuspecting victims to play…

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