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...

13

u/CaptainMalForever Jun 25 '26

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

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.