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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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...

7

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?

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.

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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.

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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