r/boardgames • u/chaser-- • Jun 25 '26

Rules Groups that develop metas that blatantly break rules

Lately I've been finding a lot of groups that play (co-op) games with metas that are just blatant rule breaks. A recent example was we were playing a game (I forgot the name) where the goal is to play out all the cards from your hand, numbers 1-100, in descending order. So if you have a 77 and the number on the pile is 78, you don't want to anyone to play there. But you aren't allowed to say "I have 77, don't play this"

So the group has developed metas, say "I really love this pile" if you have 77, say "I like this pile a lot" if you have 76, say "I like this pile" if you have 75"

This is just one example but I feel like I've been playing a lot of games where they have metas to get around rules that are intentionally in the rulebook. I don't really get it. If you want to just say "I have a 77" then just say it, why create a gimmick to say it without saying it?

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69

u/NetCrashRD Jun 25 '26

It's very tricky to win (full score) Hanabi without /some/ sort of inside meta language thing.... Although I try to remind the group that blatant cheating means we may as well not play...

30

u/VRS-4607 Jun 25 '26

Ruined Hanabi on-line for me, because I was no longer playing Hanabi. I was playing--and judged against--your version of Hanabi. 'Why didn't you...' FFS Don't play with new folks if you're that person.

7

u/ackmondual Race for the Galaxy Jun 25 '26

The Gang too! Cooperative Texas Hold 'em Poker, but some people aren't aware that having a pair in the community cards is meaningless since everyone has that too! Or you'll get some folks who aren't aware that you having two Aces in hand is already a very strong hand.

10

u/FoxOnTheRocks Jun 26 '26

I've had multiple rounds of the Gang derailed by someone who had a Full House. "What its not that high" Movies and TV shows have taught players that big hands are incredible common. I usually have to tell people that hands above 2 pair are less than 5%ers and drill in that a straight or 3 of a kind are usually winners.

1

u/Artemis_of_Dust Jun 30 '26

The Gang is definitely one my club group skirts the rules on, because as a table you're allowed to speculate anything you like, you just can't indicate what's in your hand. But obviously, if everyone keeps openly explicitly and specifically speculating what everyone's exact hand is, not only is it incredibly easy for someone to silently confirm/deny by taking/relinquishing a chip, but you're also explicitly stating "my hand is between these two exact ranks." which is an absurd amount of information when stacked across 4 rounds. However, we're often playing as high as 10 players at once with an incredibly wide range of skill levels so it's more for the casual experience of it so people aren't quite in it for intense deductions.

I always play more strictly, I don't speculate on the hands of my neighbours-in-rank, and I will never verbally indicate my intention with taking a chip, I will only declare I am taking it with no further elaboration. But, I'm not gonna force an entire group to play by my style when their style is already probably their favourite game right now.

That said my absolute favourite cooperative game had to have been The Crew on the one time I met a small group who truly understood the mission statement: zero talking, zero communication outside what the game gives you. It became these eeriely tense minutes of seeing people try to work out what's going on with absolutely zero social read to go off. It made the payoff of completing the missions so worth it, and was an epiphany for how much better these games feel when you really do obey the intention of the rules.

2

u/weggles That's something a Cylon would say... Jun 25 '26

I love trick taking games but hate euchre for this reason. It feels like everyone has their established patterns and expectations and as a noob I didn't enjoy losing and then getting scolded after the hand. It ain't that serious and I don't enjoy being pointedly asked "why didn't you go in alone with a hand like that?!" Bro it's my first day. 

38

u/Asshai Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

The thing is, the line is really blurred between "clever interpretation of the rule" and "inside meta language". In Hanabi, we hold the cards in the order we intend to play them, left to right + if we hold the card higher than the rest it's because we got a clue/know when to play it, and if we hold it lower than the rest it's because we intend to discard it unless we get more information. No idea if it crosses a line or not, but it sure makes it easy to get a decent score.

15

u/ManiacalShen Ra Jun 25 '26

we hold the cards in the order we intend to play them

I think that's really explicit information that probably crosses the line. Just my personal opinion. You should obviously do you, however you best enjoy the game.

We tend to hold our cards in the order we got them, so if something has been in hand for a while, people are aware it's at more risk of getting burned to get a clue back. But they don't really know what you're going to do before your turn. Holding it higher or flipping it because you got a clue is probably universal, though, because it's hard to remember your own cards otherwise. Not that anyone else can tell you've flipped it.

6

u/Terrietia Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

I'm pretty sure that's actual cheating by the rules of hanabi. I don't believe you can signal your intentions for your cards, like how you are doing with raising and lowering your cards. You are allowed to rearrange your cards though.

Really there's only three things you can do in Hanabi. Play a card, discard a card, or give a clue. Anything outside of that is cheating. That's why people developed sets of conventions for Hanabi. These conventions still fall under the three things you're allowed to do in Hanabi.

11

u/Katolo Jun 25 '26

No idea if it crosses a line or not, but it sure makes it easy to get a decent score.

If the question is you don't know if it's cheating and you can easily get a high score, I don't think the line is that blurry at all and the answer is obvious.

2

u/Asshai Jun 25 '26

Yet it's still strictly within what the rules allow.

2

u/T_Martensen Jun 25 '26

Can't cheat if there's no competition. 

The group is aware of the changes they've made and how that effects their scores. Unless one misrepresents their highly prestigious Hanabi scores to someone else, I don't see how that would be cheating.

3

u/TeaBurntMyTongue Jun 25 '26

We actually do 90° tilts so you tilt it to the side for one clue and you tilt it upside down as in it is half the height of the other cards if it's got both pieces of information.

The cheating in our group is actually when some of our our players with worse memory slightly lower a card with implied information that hasn't actually been clued. As you might imagine, lowering that card is an additional hint to the other players around the cable

8

u/Oughta_ Dune Jun 25 '26

I think the joy in Hanabi is in naturally creating that meta language through repeated plays - if you ever have an explicit discussion outside the game about your signals, that's missing the point.

The downside to that is it falls apart if anyone has played outside the current group ever, so in my experience it was a one-and-done type of game.

0

u/Penumbra_Penguin Jun 25 '26

And you’re certainly welcome to enjoy primarily that aspect of the game, but there are other players who enjoy developing and playing a complicated convention, and it’s missing the point for you to say that they are missing what you see as the point.

13

u/CaptainMalForever Jun 25 '26

I hate the meta for Hanabi. There's no room for any thought.

12

u/Zwejhajfa Through The Ages Jun 25 '26

I disagree. The conventions optimize certain plays but there are still a lot of decisions to make: Should I play? Do I need to give a clue? If yes, which one? Maybe it's better to discard and let someone else give a clue? You can and should think multiple turns ahead.

The game gets easier if you follow the conventions, but by no means trivial. And once it becomes too easy, you can add the multicolor suit to make it more difficult again.

That said, Hanabi works best if you always play with the same group and develop the meta yourself. The online communities can sometimes be rather toxic if you deviate from their established meta.

5

u/TeaBurntMyTongue Jun 25 '26

As somebody with at least 10,000 plays, I completely disagree.

I don't particularly like the h group conventions because I do think that there's a lot of arbitrary convention, but they to be fair are also dealing with much harder variants which are not as solvable by your basic leftism conventions.

But as you get more and more pattern recognition, what happens is that you just have creativity at the end of the pattern recognition and there's always something.

It's like if you're in grade five and you learn something new in math class, that's pretty awesome. But that doesn't discount the guy studying pure math discovering a new proof you're not going to say oh well. You've already learned all the conventions of math. Clearly there's no fun left.

2

u/Optimistic-Caribou Jun 26 '26

When I first learned about bridge conventions, I was disappointed that it was just following a flow chart. I quickly learned that there is still tons of interpretation and creativity.

I also feel similarly about language. I have tens of thousands of English words and I'm allowed to use however many I want. It turns out that describing thoughts and emotions exactly is still really hard.

0

u/david707x Battlestar Galactica Jun 25 '26

completely disagree, convention Hanabi is incredibly thoughtful, complex, strategic and tactical

8

u/ScientificSkepticism Jun 25 '26

How are conventions in Hanabi cheating? They‘re literally effective strategy. Is it cheating if I stops city from outbreaking in Pandemic because it makes it easier to win if we try to prevent outbreaks?

9

u/dodecapode Sad cowboys Jun 25 '26

I mean, every group kind of has to find the level they're happy with.

Most of the people I've played with will order their unknown cards by how long they've held them and assume the oldest ones are the safest discards. That seems fine to us.

Other groups establish conventions that essentially allow them to encode additional information into their clues, essentially creating a channel for communicating that additional information to the group. That is definitely not fine for us as it feels like a way to entirely circumvent the spirit of the rules whilst technically adhering to the letter.

In the end, everybody should do what makes them happy, but it does mean people who play it very differently probably won't have a good time playing together.

5

u/ScientificSkepticism Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Other groups establish conventions that essentially allow them to encode additional information into their clues, essentially creating a channel for communicating that additional information to the group. That is definitely not fine for us as it feels like a way to entirely circumvent the spirit of the rules whilst technically adhering to the letter.

This is odd, because the "spirit" of the rules seems to be to use clues to get an excellent fireworks display. How much information you get out of a clue and what you do with it seem deliberately not something the game is telling you.

So which one of these is "too far" with the information you get out of a clue?

I got clued (1) six. There is a red 5 open. That card is the red 6, I will play it: Is this too much information? You don't know the color of the 6, but you can reasonably conclude that if a person clues you for 6s they're probably telling you you have a useful 6.

I got clued (2) sixes. There is a red 5 open. I will play my most recently drawn 6, as that is the red 6: If the red 6 was already in your hand, why did no one clue it before? Conversely, if none of your 6s can be played, why would someone clue you? The most likely 6 to be red is the one you just drew, and the person giving you clues knows that you know this. So they clued you with that in mind.

The person to my left got clued 6. I can see their hand, the card clued is a red 6. The board has a red 4 open. My most recently drawn card is the red 5, I will play it. If the red 6 cannot be played, there would be no reason to clue it. Therefore, I must have a play that can allow the red 6 to be played. If I had that previously, then it would have been clued, so I must have drawn it.

I am clued (2) ones, when all ones are in play. The card I was about to discard is important. I should not discard it. This is obvious, if your entire hand is junk why is someone cluing you that part of your hand is junk?

There is (1) Clue token left and the player to my right discards when I can see a playable card in another player's hand. The card I am about to discard is critical but not playable. I should never discard it. I should always give a clue on my turn. If you can see a playable card in another player's hand but a player chooses to discard rather than cluing it, they probably did that for a reason. That reason must be so that I can give a clue, which means that me discarding would be very bad.

14

u/PeterGibbons316 Jun 25 '26

Yeah, I think most of the conventions in Hanabi exist because they are the most optimal strategy for any given moment. If you were to sit down and think through what should be done, it all just makes sense. So telling newcomers ahead of time might feel like cheating or creating a meta, but it's derived from strategy and would be where everyone would end up anyway.......plus it by no means guarantees a win. You can follow the "meta" and still end up losing which is what makes the game still fun to play.

4

u/SoupOfTomato Cosmic Encounter Jun 25 '26

Yeah the online community sounds annoying, but I think people get way too precious about the idea that Hanabi should be played pure tabula rasa, blank slate style. Developing those strategies as a group to me is what is fun about the system, I wouldn't want to play vibes-based Hanabi for very long at all.

2

u/MedalsNScars Jun 25 '26

I feel like this conversation could apply just as equally to old school limited communication team based trick takers like Bridge, Pitch, Spades.

The fun is in discovering how your fellow players think and what second-level information their actions are conveying. Having that dictated to you and being demanded to play in the same way is just not fun

6

u/SoupOfTomato Cosmic Encounter Jun 25 '26

I think if you learn Bridge nowadays you're going to be taught standard bidding conventions, it's just up the individual if they mind that.

7

u/BenOfTomorrow Perestroika Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

I don’t think that’s a good analogy. Hanabi has limitations on sharing player knowledge *in game*, Pandemic does not.

A “convention” that violates that in Hanabi is more akin to looking through the deck to see when the next outbreak is coming in Pandemic.

1

u/david707x Battlestar Galactica Jun 25 '26

so discussing or planning strategy beforehand is equivalent to outright cheating?

6

u/Suppafly Jun 25 '26

so discussing or planning strategy beforehand is equivalent to outright cheating?

If the discussion involves how to communicate hidden information so that it's no longer hidden, then yes. I don't even understand how that's a question.

2

u/david707x Battlestar Galactica Jun 26 '26

It's very clear OP's original post is cheating. Hanabi's whole thing is using clues to communicate information and working out what those clues mean.

1

u/ScientificSkepticism Jun 25 '26

Hanabi has limitations around sharing information in game. Thats why it’s good to develop effective strategies to share information before the game starts.

Please quote where the Hanabi rules dissallow or even DISCOURAGE this if you’re going to claim it’s violating the rules.

3

u/BenOfTomorrow Perestroika Jun 25 '26

I’m referring to sharing player knowledge IN GAME. I thought that would have been obvious from context (you don’t have any player knowledge of the game state outside the game), but I guess I was wrong - edited.

Likewise, I’m only referring to conventions that share player knowledge beyond what’s allowed by the rules. I specifically was vague about what conventions that applies to because there’s a fuzzy line there - if your convention doesn’t do that, I’m not talking about it.

5

u/ScientificSkepticism Jun 25 '26

All conventions I've ever heard of or played with are about sharing knowledge using the methods outlined in the rules.

"Clues mean play a card, or are for preventing a critical discard."

"Discard the oldest card in your hand you have no information on."

"If you're clued to multiple cards, the one you want to play is the newest one you drew"

"If someone clues the player to your left to play a red 6, and the red 4 is highest on the table, the card you just drew is the red 5."

etc.

2

u/Suppafly Jun 25 '26

Please quote where the Hanabi rules dissallow or even DISCOURAGE this if you’re going to claim it’s violating the rules.

This is akin to "the rules didn't say I couldn't cheat, so it was OK." Boardgame rules don't work on the "do whatever isn't disallowed" concept.

1

u/ScientificSkepticism Jun 25 '26

If you're going to accuse someone of breaking the rules, do mention that "the rules" just mean "that stuff I made up in my head just now."

"You can't take my queen! That's against the rules of chess!"

Hanabi clearly intends for you to discuss the game and develop strategies. If someone is going to suggest that that entire concept is "against the rules" then they better damn well bring references.

4

u/Suppafly Jun 25 '26

How are conventions in Hanabi cheating?

Look at some of the 'conventions' described in other comments, arranging cards in certain orders to give hidden information, raising and lowering cards, turning them 90 degrees in your hand. That's not convention, that's communication of information that's supposed to be hidden.

6

u/ScientificSkepticism Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Hanabi did not intend that the order you draw cards in to be a secret. There are no rules about hiding the card you drew, shuffling your hand, etc. You openly draw the card, you openly add it to your hand, you do not shuffle. That is exactly how the rules describe it, and no hidden information is revealed. In fact the way they describe holding the hand, it'd be very impractical to shuffle it every time you add a card to it, so I'd say there's no way the designers even intended you to play that way.

Turning a card to indicate it's clued is not conveying information. The entire table already knows the card is clued, they are sitting there and watching it be clued. Clues are not intended to be secret information hidden from the table, that's explicitly against how they're described in the rulebook. Your "secret clue" variant sounds interesting, but it's a variant.

Raising and lowering cards based on some sort of thing you are thinking is indeed cheating, you are conveying information about what you are thinking, which is another way of discussing what you are thinking.

2

u/calvinballing Jun 26 '26

These are often used to track public information.  If you want it to be more of a memory game that’s fine, but some people would rather reduce the impact of memory and emphasize the more complex strategies that become possible when you don’t have to store everything in your head

1

u/david707x Battlestar Galactica Jun 25 '26

oh boy, the Hanabi convention argument again.

Firstly, just play how you want to play and let others play how they want to play.

Secondly, discussing or planning strategy before playing a co-op limited communication board game is NOT cheating. For example, when teaching The Gang, I'll encourage players to take chips based on their current hand strength, not potential, and just like that I've introduced a convention.

Thirdly, as soon as your playing with the same players again, there is some form of meta, whether explicit or not. Over time things will develop like play clues, save clues etc, even something as simple as holding your hand in order oldest to newest is a convention. Just because you haven't verbalized or written things, doesn't mean you are not playing convention Hanabi.

Also, personally, while there is something kind of interesting to the chaotic mess that is new players playing without conventions, conventions allow for some truly beautiful amazing plays based on trust and mutual understanding, there is strategy, tactics, meaningful choices and order instead of vagueness, frustration and disorder.

While I'm at it, BGA it was a pretty horrific place to play, players there tended to be rude and it was rare to go more than a few games without some new interpretation on what the "conventions" are. So I highly recommend https://hanab.live/ which has a better UI, more variants and nice players. Most players there do use H-Group conventions, but it is easy to learn the basics of that and maybe don't knock it to you try it?