Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Note, however, that both parts of this equation are important: The choice must be negated and the reason it’s being negated is because the GM is trying to create a specific outcome. The players must try to get off the train and the GM has to lock the doors.

A simple failure to achieve a desired outcome is not railroading: If the doors are unlocked, but the players can’t figure out how the door handles work that’s not railroading. For example, a player might want to hit an ogre with his sword. If he fails his attack roll, that’s not railroading. (If the GM secretly changes the ogre’s AC so that the PC misses, that’s railroading.) If the PC tries to break down an adamantine door with a fluffy pillow, that’s still not railroading even if the GM says they have no chance of success.

It’s also not railroading if the GM has a preconceived outcome, but doesn’t negate player choices in order to make it happen. As an extreme example, consider a campaign where the PCs are FBI agents in New York during World War II. On May 2^nd, 1945, the newspaper headlines declare that Adolf Hitler died on April 30^th. The GM, of course, knew that Hitler was going to die on April 30^th long before it happened, but the newspaper headlines are not railroading the PCs.

The same remains true on a more intimate level: The GM might make a note that the beautiful dame Jane Adams is going to contact one of the FBI agents on May 15^th with information about a KGB operation targeting Manhattan Project scientists. Unless the PC deliberately goes into hiding for some reason, it’s still not railroading when Jane Adams shows up.

Finally, choices having consequences is also not railroading. If a PC punches somebody in the nose and then they punch the PC back, that’s not railroading. If a player says, “I’m going to hop on I-94 and drive from Minneapolis to Chicago.” Then it’s not railroading when the GM says, “Along the way, you pass through Eau Claire.”

In fact, choices having consequences is the exact opposite of a railroad. Railroading makes a choice meaningless. Consequences make a choice meaningful.

(Of course, not every consequence is a negative one: If the PCs piss off the Red Dragon Gang, the gang might retaliate. But it’s also possible that the PCs might be given a medal by the mayor who also asks them to do a favor for him. Or they might be contacted by the Red Dragon Gang’s rivals who want to hire them as enforcers. And so forth. None of that is railroading.)

RAILROAD BY DESIGN

Railroading, in the purest sense of the term, is something that happens at the gaming table: It is the precise moment at which the GM negates a player’s choice.

In practice, of course, the term has bled over into scenario prep. We talk about “railroaded adventures” all the time, by which we generally mean linear scenarios which are designed around the assumption that the PCs will make specific choices at specific points in order to reach the next part of the scenario. If the PCs don’t make those choices, then the GM has to railroad them in order to continue using the scenario as it was designed.

However, not all linear design was created equal. And it’s not really accurate to describe all linear scenario design as being a “railroad”.

Linear scenarios are built around a predetermined sequence of events and/or outcomes.

Consider a simple mystery:

Scene 1: The PCs come home and discover that their house has been broken into and an arcane relic stolen from their safe. They need to figure out who did it, which they can do by analyzing fingerprints, looking at their neighbor’s surveillance camera, asking questions around town to see who took the job, or casting a divination spell.

Scene 2: Having discovered that Jimmy “Fast-Fingers” Hall was responsible for the break-in, the PCs track him down. They need to figure out who hired him, which they can do by interrogating him, following him, analyzing his bank statements to figure out who paid him, or hacking his e-mail.

Scene 3: Having discovered that Bobby Churchill, a local mob boss, was the guy who hired Jimmy, the PCs need to get their relic back. They can do that by beating Bobby up, agreeing to do a job for him, or staging a covert heist to get it out of his vault.

That’s a fairly linear scenario: House to Jimmy to Bobby. But because we used the Three Clue Rule to provide a multitude of paths from one event to the next, it’s very unlikely that a GM running this scenario will need to railroad his players. The sequence of events is predetermined, but the outcome of each scene is not.

Non-linear scenarios do not require specific outcomes or events, allowing freedom of player choice.

Linear scenario design and non-linear scenario design exist on a spectrum. Generally speaking, requiring specific events (“you meet an ogre in the woods”) is less restrictive than requiring specific outcomes (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him”). And the more specific the outcome required, the more likely it is that the GM will have to railroad the players to make it happen (“you meet an ogre in the woods and you have to fight him and the killing blow has to be delivered by the Rose Spear of Vallundria so that the ogre’s ghost can come back and serve the PC at the Black Gates of Goblin Doom”).

With that being said, it’s often quite trivial for an experienced GM to safely assume that a specific event or outcome is going to happen. For example, if a typical group of heroic PCs are riding along a road and they see a young boy being chased by goblins it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll take action to rescue the boy. The more likely a particular outcome is, the more secure you are in simply assuming that it will happen. That doesn’t mean your scenario is railroaded, it just means you’re engaging in smart prep.

My point here is that you can’t let fear of a potential railroad make you throw away your common sense when it comes to prioritizing your prep. This, by the way, leads to one of the most potent tools in the GM’s arsenal:

What are you planning to do next session?

It’s a simple question, but the answer obviously gives you certainty. It lets you focus your prep with extreme accuracy because you can make very specific predictions about what your players are going to do and those predictions will also be incredibly likely to happen.

Where you get into trouble is when your scenario expects something which is both very specific and also very unlikely.

For example, in the Witchfire Trilogy from Privateer Press, there’s a moment where the PCs have all the information necessary to realize that a specific NPC is the bad guy they’ve been looking for. This makes it incredibly likely that the PCs will simply confront the bad guy. The author doesn’t want that, though: He wants the PCs to put her under surveillance and trail her back to her secret hideout. So he throws up a bunch of painfully contrived roadblocks in an effort to stop the PCs from doing the thing they are nevertheless overwhelmingly likely to do. (So You Want to Write a Railroad? is an almost endless litany of even more egregious design failures from another published scenario.)

THE RAILROAD EXCUSES

Another way of thinking about this is that the more specific and unlikely the necessary outcome, the more fragile your scenario becomes: It will break if the PCs deviate even slightly from your predetermined sequence. Once the scenario breaks, you’ll have to resort to railroading in order to fix it. This is why I often refer to railroading as a broken technique seeking to fix a broken scenario.

It’s fairly typical, for example, to hear someone say, “I only railroad my players if it’s really important.” And when you delve a little deeper, you virtually always discover that “really important” is a synonym for the GM making sure their predetermined outcome happens. These are literally people saying that they need to railroad because they designed a railroad.

Another common rationalization for railroading is that GMs have to use it in order to keep problem players in line. However, if your relationship with your players is that they’re naughty children who are testing their limits and you’re a parental figure that somehow needs to keep them in line, then your relationship with your players is fundamentally broken. More generally, what you’re talking about are issues outside of the game. Attempting to handle those issues with in-game behavior modifications is simply dysfunctional. It’s no different than if a player at your table was cheating or if they poured a drink over the head of another player: These are all problems which require intercession. But none of them are going to be solved through railroading.

One specific example of this is often cited as an exception, however: Behavior which is deliberately disruptive through the agency of the game world. For example, the guy who tries to assassinate the king when the PCs are called in for an audience. Ultimately, however, this example only cycles back to the previous two: Either the guy involved is a jackass (which is a problem that needs to be solved outside of the game) or this is really only a “problem” insofar as it disrupts your preconceived notion of how the royal audience was supposed to play out (which means we’ve arrived back at “I need to railroad them in order to maintain my railroad”).

(Note, too, how often these “problems” can quickly be solved by having the game world respond naturally to the circumstances: Crazy McGee has just assassinated the king. What happens next? Well, the king’s guard is going to try to arrest them. If they escape, there’s going to be a manhunt. Then there’s going to be a power struggle to fill the vacuum. The other PCs need to decide whether to help hunt down their former comrade or help him escape. There may be a rebel group who concludes that the PCs are on their side because of the assassination. And so forth. That all sounds like interesting stuff.)

Nobody minds the railroad if the destination is Awesome Town!

The theory here is that if you offer a big enough carrot, nobody will mind being hit by the stick a few times.

There’s a fair amount of truth to that, but what always strikes me about this popular meme is the extraordinary amount of hubris it demonstrates. See, any time that a player chooses to do something, that implicitly means that it’s something that they want. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they should automatically succeed at everything they attempt, but if you’re artificially negating their choice in order to enforce your preconceived outcome, what you’re saying is, “I know what you want better than you do.”

Which might be true. But I’m willing to bet that 99 times out of 100, it isn’t.

The railroad creates specific situations. The goal is to see how the PCs react to those specific situations.

This is a more nuanced and deliberate application of railroading techniques. The idea is that the choices you’re interested in are those made in specific moments. The methods by which individual moments are reached are of less interest, and, in fact, it’s more important to create specific moments of particular effectiveness than it is to enable choice outside of those moments. You’re basically stripping out the strategic choices of the players in order to create intense tactical experiences.

In practice, however, railroads warp the decision-making process of the players. When you systematically strip meaningful choice from them, they stop making choices and instead start looking for the railroad tracks.

So railroading PCs into a situation to see what choice they’ll make doesn’t actually work: Having robbed them of free agency in order to get them there, you’ve fundamentally altered the dynamic of the situation itself. You’ll no longer see what their reaction is; you’ll only see what they think you want their reaction to be.

I suspect that GMs who habitually railroad have difficulty seeing this warping of the decision-making process because it’s the only thing they’re used to. But it becomes glaringly obvious whenever I get the players they’ve screwed up: Nothing is more incoherent than a player trying to figure out where the railroad is when there’s no railroad to be found.

For example, I had a group who spent all their time trying to figure out which NPC was the GM NPC they were supposed to be following around because that was the method their last GM had used to lead them around by the nose. Since the scenario I was running for them revolved around a conspiracy with multiple factions who were all more than happy to use the PCs to achieve their own agendas the result was… bizarre. (Unfortunately, I only figured out what had gone so horribly wrong in the postmortem.)

Of course, it gets even more obvious once the players start demonstrating Abused Gamer Syndrome.

Go to Part 2: Methods of the Railroad

THE RAILROADING MANIFESTO
Part 2: Methods of the Railroad
Part 3: Penumbra of Problems
Part 4: Chokers
Part 5: More Chokers

Addendum: Random Railroads
Addendum: I Want To Be Railroaded
Abused Gamer Syndrome
How a Railroad Works

Recently I’ve been watching a really nifty web-series from Double Fine called Dev Play: They grab game designers and play through classic video games with them. The best episodes are the ones featuring designers playing their own games, like this one of John Romero playing through Doom:

Watching that brought back fond memories of Doom II. One of the things that you could, of course, do with the Doom games was designing your own levels. And way back in 1994, that’s exactly what I did.

In order to really understand and appreciate the vintage deathmatch map I’m about to share with you, though, you have to understand something about the weapon design of Doom II (which I still maintain had the absolute best weapons balance of any deathmatch ever designed). Specifically, you have to understand the quirks of the BFG-9000.

With this gun you could rain the destruction of green plasma down upon your enemies. But for a significant period of time, the exact mechanism by which the BFG-9000 worked was largely unknown. It wasn’t really until Tony Fabris, after painful experimentation, released his “BFG FAQ” that people really began to appreciate just how clever this weapon was. The short version is that the BFG-9000 deals damage in two steps:

First, there is the primary plasma ball. The plasma ball deals a ton of damage, but often not enough damage to outright kill the target.

Second, a moment after the primary plasma ball detonates, twenty invisible traces are sent out from the player who fired the BFG-9000. Each of these traces deal less damage, but the closer you are to the person who fired the gun the more of the traces will hit you. (The damage from these traces also decreases over distance.)

Note that the key feature here is that the traces emanate from where you are when the detonation happens, not the location from which you fired a gun. That allows you to, for example, fire the BFG-9000 at a wall, step out from behind the corner, and allow the blast traces to kill someone.

BFG WONDERLAND

Which brings us to the deathmatch level I designed, which was specifically designed to be an arena for high-skill BFG-9000 maneuvers. As I wrote in the original data file for the level:

BFG WONDERLAND is composed of a main central room — from which four corridors lead off. The rocket launcher is available along the northern passage, shotguns available along the eastern. If you take the western passage you’ll find a plasma rifle and a door leading to an ammo dump which will be discussed later.

The central challenge of the level, however, is the southern passage — which is several thousand units long. At the end of it is the BFG9000. Due to the great length of this corridor (and the general openness of the rest of the level) the BFG does, indeed, become a “thinking man’s weapon”. Dodging the green ball as it comes down the corridor and then getting behind your opponent before the ball detonates or racing after your ball because otherwise your opponent will be too far away before it detonates makes this an “intelligent” level with instantly deadly consequences for mistakes.

Many, many hours were spent dancing around the southern passage in LAN deathmatches. Maybe next time you get a hankering to pull out Doom II, you might do the same.

BFG WONDERLAND

One of the problems a lot of RPG sourcebooks have is that they don’t include enough practical, game-able material: The type of stuff that you can actually bring to the table and start playing with. Over the past few years, however, I’ve started leveraging a lot more utility out of my RPG setting sourcebooks by simply rolling back the clock.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain what I mean is by way of example.

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE: DROPLET

In the Eclipse Phase universe, the Pandora Gates allow humanity to skip across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds. The Gatecrashing supplement details a selection of the many worlds which lie beyond the gates, including the world dubbed Droplet.

One of the cool things about Eclipse Phase is that Posthuman Studios has licensed the entire game under a Creative Commons license. So if you want to follow along, you can download the Gatecrashing PDF for free from Rob Boyle’s site and follow along. (The section on Droplet starts on page 89.)

The core thing to know about Droplet is that it was once home to an intelligent race that humanity refers to as the Amphibs. The Amphibs gave rise to a technological civilization about 1 million years ago and then abruptly died out. They left remarkably durable ruins scattered all across the planet, but the most significant Amphib artifact is the titanic Toadstool:

TOADSTOOL

This unique alien construct rises from the floor of a shallow ocean, just offshore from Davis Island, approximately 600 kilometers from the Droplet Gate. It is shaped like a mushroom with a stalk 80 meters in diameter, rising 90 meters above the ocean’s surface and extending 80 meters down to the ancient volcanic bedrock that makes up that coastline. Above this “stem” is a flattened ovoid, 460 meters in diameter and 110 meters thick. It is clearly artificial and seamless, made of unknown but sturdy composite materials. After detailed examinations, scientists now believe this structure is over a billion years old, likely established well before the evolution of the Amphibs, when Droplet itself was a much different planet. Despite its age, the Toadstool appears to be in perfect condition, as if it was created no more than a few years ago. Close scrutiny has revealed that its walls swarm with specialized nanotechnology that keep it in perfect repair, removing algae-like biological growths that would normally accumulate from the ocean.

Researchers also assume that these nanomachines— or some other unknown mechanism—are responsible for the fact that the stem of the Toadstool is only 200 meters from the shore despite a billion years of erosion and slowly shifting geology. Though the Toadstool has proven to be impenetrable to all forms of scanning, a careful examination of the underlying rock indicates that this structure is mostly hollow. So far, all attempts to gain entrance to the Toadstool have failed. The walls are made of exceptionally hard materials and repair themselves within moments of any damage being done. No one has been willing to use nuclear weapons or other similarly devastating means to breach this construct’s walls, since the goal is to get inside and not to destroy it. Extensive Amphib ruins have been found in the vicinity of the Toadstool. The native life forms clearly built a large city around it and considered the Toadstool important to their culture. There is no evidence that they ever learned more about it than transhumanity currently knows, but simple graphics of the Toadstool can be found on many of their items that were in daily use.

Amongst the Amphib ruins which surround the Toadstool there are also a number of ruins belonging to another extinct race known as the Iktomi. Gatecrashers have found Iktomi ruins all over the galaxy, but it’s quite unusual to find them on Droplet because the physical conditions of the planet are completely dissimilar to their other habitats. The most logical conclusion is that the Iktomi were just as fascinated by the Toadstool as humanity is. As with their other sites, however, the Iktomi appear to have vanished a few thousand years ago, leaving only their dream shells.

The other odd thing about the Toadstool is that async psi-sensitives find its proximity intensely unpleasant.

USING DROPLET

And that’s pretty much it as far as Droplet is concerned.

If you wanted to use Droplet in your campaign, one way of doing that, of course, would be to figure out what happens next: What is the secret of the Toadstool? Does it manifest its purpose in some terrible way? Are there hidden archives within the Iktomi ruins which might shed light upon it? And so forth.

These approaches, however, take only minimal advantage of the material found in the Gatecrashing supplement. The stuff you’re creating is certainly being built on the foundation of the material found in the sourcebook, but the active material — the stuff you’re really using in your game — is all being created from scratch.

There’s nothing wrong with simply standing on the shoulders of giants and creating new stuff, of course, but the other way you could approach Droplet would be to simply rewind the timeline. Back things up to the point before humanity had found Droplet and then have the PCs step through as the first explorers of this unknown world. Now all of the stuff described in the supplement becomes active fodder for your game:

• The PCs get to stumble through the Amphib ruins surrounding the Pandora Gate and become the discoverers of a lost alien race.
• They’re the ones who discover an Amphib map guiding them to the Toadstool.
• They get to probe the Toadstool and discover its strange properties.
• It’s a PC async who first experiences the “blinding stimuli” of the Toadstool.

And so forth.

After you’ve leveraged all that material, of course, you’re now free to continue building on that foundation in exactly the same way that you could before. But now that foundation has been made intensely personal for your and your players: They lived that stuff. So when a Go-Nin team comes through the Pandora Gate and tries to stake a claim to the Toadstool, the conflict which erupts between the scientific missions the PCs have been sponsoring and the hypercorporate stooges becomes intensely meaningful to them.

SELECTIVE REWINDING

In the case of Droplet we’re basically rewinding the whole setting. That’s a technique that can actually work in a lot of RPG settings, but it’s also quite possible to take just one aspect of the setting and back it up half a step.

For example, in Shadows of Asia for Shadowrun, we can read about how Queen Michelle of Shaanxi rose to power by funneling support from her sanctuary in England to the rebels fighting the military junta in her homeland. We don’t have to wind back the entirety of the Shadowrun setting in order to back the clock up a couple of ticks and have the PCs running Michelle’s guns.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I think what’s going on here is some combination of two factors:

First, the creation of an RPG setting is an inherently narrative creation. And we have a strong desire to bring our narratives to a conclusion.

Second, most of us live in a world that we largely perceive as as status quo: The United States government was here yesterday. Our job was here yesterday. They will still be here tomorrow. (Of course, we all occasionally experience big changes in our lives. But the change generally comes to an end and then we’re in another form of status quo.)

But when it comes to an RPG, the status quo is generally not very useful. What we’re interested in is the cusp. The thing that is about to happen (or which is currently happening) that the PCs can get caught up in.

Some setting supplements, of course, are better at this than others. For example, I had Heavy Gear: Life on Caprice readily to hand as I was writing this up and I flipped through it looking for a good example I could use. I couldn’t find anything, though, because every single gazetteer entry seemed to make a point of describing what was happening right now. For supplements like that, this tip becomes irrelevant. They’ve already got you perched on the cusp. You just need to push!

Hamlet offers an excellent example of why many modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays can’t be entirely trusted. While the traditions of emendation which have arisen around each play over the past 400 years have generally improved the texts, some of these traditions are both radically incorrect and yet rabidly stubborn in their persistence. It can be truly amazing to return to the original texts (imperfect as they may be) and discover that things you thought were fundamental to a play were, in fact, concocted out of whole cloth by an essentially random bloke in the 18th century.

(This is why preparing fresh scripts from the original sources is an important part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare.)

If you’ve got a copy of Hamlet handy, I invite you to flip it open to scene 1.5 and find these lines:

HAMLET My tables, my tables, meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

I can virtually guarantee you that near these lines you will find the stage direction “Writing”, “Hamlet writes”, or the like. And if it isn’t on the line itself, then you’ll find it in the notes. (As with the third Arden edition, which reads in its notes: “Hamlet now produces a literal writing tablet or notebook.”)

Now, it is absolutely true that “tables” is an archaic term meaning “tablet”. But I can absolutely guarantee you that Shakespeare never intended for Hamlet to yank out a notebook and begin jotting down the minutes of his meeting with the Ghost.

Why can I do that? First, because the stage direction doesn’t appear in the original texts. Second, because this passage reads, in its entirety:

… Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmix’d with baser matter; yes, by heaven.
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables; meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

“The table of my memory.”

Never has a clearer metaphor been written. And yet when the metaphor is reinvoked a mere 9 lines later, modern editors universally interpret it in the most literal of fashions and jam in the stage direction. The direction itself was originally created by Nicholas Rowe in 1709 as part of what can arguably be called the first modern edition of the play, and it’s stuck fast ever since. Arden, Oxford, Riverside, Yale, Folger, New Cambridge… You can even find it in the Klingon Hamlet. I have literally never seen a printed copy of the play that didn’t include the direction in some form (except facsimiles and other editions seeking to present the original text without editorial correction), and for ten years now I’ve made a habit of picking up any copy of the play I come across and flipping it open to the incriminating passage.

How is this possible? I surely don’t know.

What I do know is that this misguided editorial tradition has had a tremendous impact on the performance history of the play. As early as 1755 we have written records of an audience member complaining, “‘Tis absurd to suppose that Hamlet actually stood in need of tables to refresh his memory upon so affecting an occasion.” The jarring nature of Hamlet “stopping his action” to pull out pen and paper has often left performers seeking an alternative: John Gielgud apologized for excluding this bit of business from his performance. Mel Gibson seized his sword and attempted to carve the words into the stone walls of Elsinore. Others have writ the words in their own blood.

On the other hand, there are those who have fully embraced the direction. In the 2000 National Theater production of the play, for example, it became a central pillar of Simon Russell Beale’s performance as he carried a small notebook and pen throughout the play, jotting down notes as the moments suited him. While the conceit is fascinating (one could even imagine such a diary being given over to the charge of Horatio at the end of the play), there seems little doubt in my mind that it would not have arisen if not for this errant stage direction.

Originally posted on November 20th, 2010.

Tagline: “The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.” Great fun for the clever, the intrigued, and the sadistic.

Imagine: You sit down at a table with your gaming buddies, and they’ve all got a funny grin on their face. “What is it?” you ask, oblivious to your inevitable fate this evening will bring to you. “We’ve got a new game,” they say. “Oh?” you say. “Sounds cool. What’s it called?” “Mao.”

Maniacal laughter echoes through the room.

You’re confused. “Meow? Like the sound a cat makes?” “No, no,” they say. “Mao as in Mao Tse-tung. But that’s unimportant.”

Brave soul that you are, you say, “Well, what are the rules?”

More maniacal laughter.

“The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.”

“Which one?”

“The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.”

“You mean you can’t tell me any of the rules, except the rule which stops you from telling me the rules?”

“The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.”

“Uhh… okay. Let’s go.”

WHAT IS MAO?

Mao, as you may have already surmised, is a card game where the first and foremost rule is that you cannot state the rules. You must learn while playing, all the while being penalized for breaking rules which you don’t even know exist. (Obviously you learn what you should be doing based on what you shouldn’t be doing and are getting penalized for, as well as the example of correct play from the other players.)

The other trick up Mao’s sleeve is that at the end of every round of play, the winner of that round gets to add a new rule to the game – a rule which he doesn’t tell to anyone else. The rule can take any form (including the overriding of the core rules) and remains in effect for the rest of the evening. Thus, even once you learn the game, you still haven’t learned the game.

The only other thing I can specifically tell you about this game is that it is played with two normal decks of 52 playing cards.

THEN HOW DO I LEARN?

There is, of course, at this point an obvious dilemma: How do you learn the game if I (and no one else) can tell you the rules and no one local to you knows how to play?

By reading an example of play.

With such an example no one is telling you the rules (and thus breaking the rules), but they do allow you to conclude what the rules are through inference.

The best resources I have found thus far are the pages of Ka Wai Tam. His examples of play are the best and most concise I have found, and he links to several other Mao resource pages.

 MAO VARIATIONS

Things aren’t quite as easy as I’ve lead you to believe.

Anyone who is a card game aficionado (I occasionally like to think of myself as such) knows that the rules of games tend to fluctuate wildly over time. Although certain centralized resources such as Hoyle’s compendium have a tendency to lock certain games into specific patterns (Parker Brothers’ version of Monopoly, for example, has successfully wiped out the vibrant sub-culture of variant Monopolies which preceded it), the tendency is still there. Anyone with a roleplaying background shouldn’t find this all that surprising – the dawn of the industry were basically hacks of D&D which differed from it to various degrees, and today the web serves as a central clearinghouse of home rules, variants, and expansions for many popular systems.

A moment’s reflection should lead you to the quick realization that the basic nature of Mao would quickly lead itself to healthy perversions, growth, and variation. After all, the core spirit of the rules discourages setting anything down in stone – and someone who plays a brief session may never pick up on some of the subtle nuances (and thus would carry a distorted version of the game with them to be taught to someone else). Plus, the fact that you are supposed to add a new rule to Mao after every round of the game lends itself to the development of favorite home rules which may lead to their incorporation into the core rules.

The exact origins of Mao are unknown. There is a strong probability that it derived from a German card game called Mau-mau (note the similarity in name). Another path traces it to Bartog, a similar card game. All of these may ultimately be bizarre perversions of Nomic.

The earliest reference to Mao is to Mark Alexander’s group at Ithaca College in New York. Where it went from there is unclear, but apparently students carried it from one East Coast college to another. By the mid-‘80s there were hotbeds of Mao variant activity in Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Today there are at least three major “families” of Mao variants, and probably far more hanging around out there that we don’t know about.

(Check out Jason Holtzapple’s Unofficial Mao Card Game Site. He has a Mao Family Tree, documenting variants which are known to him. If anyone has knowledge of other variants, I’d loved to hear about them – and I’m sure Holtzapple would, too.)

Ka Wai Tam’s version of Mao is known as “Waterloo Mao” – it’s a fairly simple and straight-forward version, and is greatly helped by the fact that his examples of play are comprehensive to a degree which many other examples fail to achieve. (The only problem I had was figuring out some specific rules relating to spades. After some brief correspondence with him I believe I’ve got that sorted out, though – and will gladly help guide anyone to the proper conclusions. Then again, maybe I’ve intuited it all wrong and have introduced a whole new variant to Mao. Such is Mao.)

CONCLUSION

If you aren’t intrigued by Mao at this point, definitely skip it. It’s obviously not your type of thing. Personally, I stumbled across references to the game while doing some web research on Nomic (which I may eventually get around to reviewing as well) and was instantly ensnared by the concept. The game is both clever and complex, successfully existing at multiple levels of play, comprehension, and strategy. I heartily recommend it to card game fanatics everywhere.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Anonymous
Company/Publisher: None
Cost: Free!
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/21

I remember this review creating a fascinating schism of reaction: A lot of people criticized me for posting a review of a free and public domain game. This seemed to be driven by a couple of factors: First, there were people who felt the primary purpose of a review was to tell them whether or not they should spend money on a game (and therefore a review of something free, which they could check out without paying anything, was pointless). Second, there were people convinced that Mao (or one of its variants) was so common that it was impossible that people hadn’t heard of it.

XKCD didn’t exist yet, so I wasn’t able to reference the lucky 10,000. But I felt personally vindicated in the review by those who replied to say that they hadn’t heard of the game but were intrigued by what I had to say.

For me, personally, Mao was both a revelation and a 60 day fad: I enjoyed it a lot. One of these days I should really teach it to myself again.

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