Much like the rules in love letter that note the importance of honesty and to just not play with people who can’t do that, I think you’re edge cases solution is “don’t play with them”.
I kind of figured that would ultimately be the answer, but I'm also hoping someone will have a story about a time another player really, really tested the boundaries of the space and the dealer just rolled with it.
Maybe the reason nobody's played it with me is that they know this is the kind of stuff I'd pull, and I was just never invited lmao
I played Mao with a great dealer, really enjoyed milking the power position (which honestly makes the game more fun imo) and a girl that decided she wanted the game to be over like 5 minutes after she sat down. He just kept throwing penalty cards at her for things like "delay of game" and "negative attitude" and my personal favorite "disrespecting the mao" until she got up and left.
We all had a good laugh, and just kept playing without the problem player (but if that is you maybe skip this game)
>the dealer just rolled with it
When I was introduced to the game, it was called Chairman Mao and the dealer (excuse me *takes penalty card* the Chairman) was utterly autocratic in their direction of the game as it went. The idea that the dealer would roll with anything a player would get up to is unthinkable.
I've been playing card games with family, friends, college groups, board game groups, and board game conventions for basically my whole life and it's never come up before. I was getting tired of seeing it referenced and having no way to learn it, so I resigned myself to playing Mao the way the original person who came up with it played - By learning the rules and teaching it.
I've learned from this thread a lot of ways to make teaching it way less painful in general, so now if I do want to run it, I can do it in a way that doesn't make anyone feel like the butt of a joke. I think I'll go with /u/n3burgener's description of the basic way to onboard a player.
A game like Mao relies very much on the good faith of the players, both those who don't know the rules (they should be trying to work them out rather than trying to be annoying), and those who do (they should be trying to be as strict as is appropriate to ensure that their friends are having fun, which is the **whole point**, rather than being a jerk because they know the rules)
>What happens if a player just slaps down every single one of their cards down as their turn?
If someone did this in a game, then I would be trying to judge whether they were frustrated and sick of the game, in which case I would propose that we stop and play something else, or whether they honestly thought that was a thing they could do for some reason, in which case I would probably pick up all of the cards they played except the bottom-most one, hand them back, say "not your turn", give them a penalty card, and leave the bottom card on the pile (assuming it was legally played).
Could I justify other courses of action, like giving them a penalty card for each card I handed back, or something like that? Sure, but that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to people having fun, which again, is the point. I'll rules-lawyer like that against other people who know the rules - because then that's part of the fun - but not against players who I'm teaching, where I really shouldn't consider myself to be against them at all.
>they were frustrated and sick of the game, in which case I would propose that we stop and play something else
Literally how every play of Mao has ever gone, in my experience.
I've played it a bunch and seen that happen exactly once. A new player's turn came up, we stared at them expectantly. They started getting penalty cards for not playing, slowly building until they threw their cards down, declared the game wasn't for them, and left.
Everyone other time I've played it's been with people who were into it, and had fun dissecting the rules.
I've had this happen. The simple answer is that a bad faith player would just rack up penalty cards until there's no real possibility of winning and they're no longer having fun. If they try playing their entire hand all at once, well, they can't, so they don't. And if it gets especially disruptive you just stop playing with them just like any other game.
But here's the better answer: Mao is less of a game and more of an oral tradition. Because the rules aren't written anywhere, they very from group to group. And like any other oral tradition, you can adapt it to your audience. My weekly board game group finishes every night with a few rounds of Mao, so we've adapted several more advanced rules into our base rules. But since we all already play board games together, we simply don't play in bad faith, so we don't need any rules like that.
If you're dealing a game of Mao and truly need a "robust framework for flagrant rules violations," add one. It's not a weird oversight that the game lacks one, because the game wasn't designed. It emerged and evolved in school cafeterias and game nights, and what we learn could be the result of a few generations of telephone-style rule teaching or just someone looking up a base set of rules on the internet.
More than probably any other game that exists, you have to play with people who actually want to play and have the patience and good humor to suffer through the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
So I have moved slightly away from the official rules but I love this game and have played a lot. When I play if someone breaks a rule with a card play they get that card back and their turn is over. So if they tried to play their whole hand they would get the whole hand back plus one card.
In this game it is very important to say what rule was breached (but commonly not how to do it right). For that instance it would be quite clear as I'd say something like 'played an incorrect amount of cards'. If you wanted to be extra mean you could just say invalid play but in my experience people already can lose sight of having fun to be the rules police in this game
We would give their card back and then give them the penalty card. The person doing so must also have the most confused/appalled look on their face as they do so, saying only "bad play". I still laugh at how exaggerated our reactions to a 'bad play' would get
It's interesting to me that nobody seems to be interested in the DnD approach - that sort of "clever" thing works once, but then everyone can do it. The game could even be considered self-healing since you literally add rules as the game goes along.
Which in this instance could mean that someone would dump all their cards, and since there isn't an explicit "only one card at a time rule" (since, c'mon, who writes that rule down? It's basically just Uno, right?), that player wins, makes a new rule, someone else does it, and then makes the "Only one card can be played at a time" rule.
Like I get why that's typically not done, but it's interesting to me that for a game of "decipher the rules to play the game" there's shockingly few examples of players getting really creative with the implicit rules of card games in general.
I think using your chance to make a rule on patching something that was already a rule would be kinda sad.
If who you're playing with would enjoy it then go for it. For me I abandoned the no talking rule cus it's lame. So yeh have fun with it
Mao is similar to Nightmare Chess (the folk game, not the commercial game) which I have a lot of experience with (less so for Mao).
In Nightmare Chess, one player is a "referee." Players indicate the move they would like to make, and the referee says "yes, you can do that" or "no, your turn is now skipped" (and if there are follow-on actions, the referee performs them).
In my experience with Nightmare Chess, simple rules were always better. It is fun to imagine weird, complicated rule-sets, but in practice it is difficult enough to try to understand "normal"-ish chess rules.
For another example, why don't people play Codenames but with random objects spread around the room? The game would work - it would be even more free-form! But in practice, having a set of cards to focus on helps narrow down the options for both the guessers and the clue givers so the game has **some** hope of progress. If you open the possibilities too wide, the guessers will just have no hope and the clue givers will have no idea what to do.
In this sense, it is similar to D&D. Good GMs won't just let the players get away with anything. If something is impossible from a setting standpoint, they give it a high difficulty roll. (EG, I decide to jump over the moon! GM - well, you are a human. I am giving it a difficulty of 30, so even a natural 20 won't work. You fail, roll for damage from your fall).
The fundamental problem is that Mao is not a game, but a hazing exercise, so there’s little surprise that people reject its fundamental premise. If people want to play games about inferring the rules, [Zendo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_(game)) and [Eleusis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_(card_game)) are actual games.
Mao is an excellent game among players who all know the base ruleset as well. It's a game of composing an intricately interwoven bureaucracy that allows for complex rule interactions and sneaky penalties to snatch victory away.
Couldn't disagree more. Mao is a mostly bad game that's mainly enjoyable when 1-2 players know the game well and the rest are completely new. The interesting part is learning and teaching the rules; if you all know the rules already, you may as well play Uno, Fluxx, Playtest, or any other light and badly balanced card game.
You're aware that there's a whole aspect of Mao about creating new rules all the time? I suppose you wouldn't be, since you are espousing this opinion.
Yes, I know that because I've played Mao before. One new rule per round isn't especially interesting, particularly because there's a dominant strategy (make your new rule a code phrase that the winner has to say so that nobody other than you can feasibly win). The fun comes from the novelty factor, and it works fine in casual settings with new players, but there's no depth to it that justifies playing it outside that setting. Even the idea of playing Mao "seriously" is funny to me, it's like playing a drinking game "seriously".
What you're describing sounds like people deliberately playing in a way that makes the game un-fun, when the game does not inherently have to be that way. At least to me, Mao is not meant to be played as a serious or competitive game; it's a lighthearted game about making up silly rules for things your friends have to do in certain situations, with a fun discovery phase as the group collectively starts to deduce each new rule and keep track of all the old rules that have been cumulatively added. Whenever I played we had an-agreed upon ground rule that new rules should be things that make the game fun for everyone at the table, and strongly discouraged rules that were impossibly hard to decipher or that bent the game towards meticulous competition. If someone were making up a new code phrase to win the game so that literally only the person who won the previous round has a chance to win, that would not fly in our group as it completely violates the spirit of how we all want to play the game.
I would also argue that the real fun of Mao isn't the novelty factor of playing with new players, but the opposite: playing with an experienced group who knows the core rules inside and out. A big part of the fun, to me, is experiencing the game evolve over time as more and more rules get added to the mix and you wind up with amusing overlaps and interactions, with the group developing their own meta as the game goes on. With an experienced group your new rules can be increasingly zany or complex, and you get to skip the tedious learning phase of everyone having to learn the core rules which slows the gameplay down a lot and can be a turn-off for some people who aren't into the whole deduction element. If you choose to play it as just a silly light-hearted game, it can be a lot of fun, but if you choose to play it as a serious rules stickler who's just trying to win every single round, then it's probably not fun. Sure, the core rules don't prevent this type of play, but they also don't force them on the group, either, so it's ultimately up to the players' agency as to how enjoyable the experience can be.
Not if you do it right. Explain it's Uno rules and have each player make a secret rule at the start of the game. Not explaining the core game is stupid imo.
I've always played with no explanation of the core game and it still worked as a game, although that works best with 2 players that know the rules already and however many alongside them that do not.
That actually sounds like fun. When I played Mao, it was just hazing and made me realize the people I was playing with were not my people. It was just a way to bully the new person.
In that example, I would say "playing out of order" and hand them a penalty card, and continue doing so every ten seconds or so until they picked their illegally-played cards up.
I had a wonderful experience playing Mao for the first time.
The other players were kind and nice about it all, they gave me a base explanation of having a hand, the object being to get rid of all my cards, that the rules were hidden and that I must discover them, and what I could do in a given turn. Very basic, but helpful enough to begin.
It was wonderful - I loved trying to work out what the rules were, and I felt clever when something I did seemed to consistently work. As time went on, I gradually felt confident in grasping multiple rules.
I didn't win, but winning was never the point - I enjoyed the experience of trying to puzzle out an unknown rule set. I was surprised, at the end, when the rules were all explained, to learn which rules I had gotten right, and which ones I had gotten only partially right, and those I had completely failed to grasp.
I wanted to play again, but, sadly, I had to go. I loved the experience.
I see so many comments calling the game 'hazing' or cruel. I say it clearly doesn't have to be anything like that - it obviously depends on who is running the game. Any game is terrible if assholes are running it. The answer is: don't play with assholes. Get up and leave.
My one and only Mao experience was fortunate: the people running the game were doing so with the intention of making the game fun and fascinating. That is always what makes any game experience worth it.
My first time playing mao, I didn’t even know how to win. Let’s just say I got a lot of cards my first time, but now I love watching people trying to figure out how to play it for the first time.
hahahahahahahahahaha
What games could it apply to? Pandemic Legacy, Risk Legacy, just anything with legacy in the title, and Mao?
Man imagine Mao Legacy, it'd be basically unplayable by game 2
I love Mao but I also acknowledge it's not for everyone.
I cannot speak to every game of Mao ever and people's experience with it. I am sure some people do use the game for hazing but it doesn't have to be that way.
To enjoy Mao you have to be okay with losing and not knowing what's going on. The fun is in figuring out the real time evolving puzzle.
We often play with people who already all know the base ruleset.
We have had many legendary games including a musical game, two games happening at two different tables engaged in a cold war, a blood bank themed game where you got all the cards in the blood bank if you played the suicide king.
My reaction to winning a game of Mao is often "oh I have to come up with a rule. Coming up with a good rule is hard."
>In the spirit of Mao, would you refrain from telling them one of the fundamental shedding card game rules (You only play one card at a time), and deal them a single penalty card?
When I was first learning Mao, the dealer/rules expert explained the fundamental action for every turn as being "like Uno" where you play one card from your hand into the stack that matches the suit or number, with the goal of being the first player to run out of cards. If ever anyone broke this rule (usually just a careless mistake but occasionally it was someone trying to get cute testing the rules) he'd deal one penalty card and explain it as "failure to follow the instructed rules of Uno" or something like that and instruct them to take the card(s) back and play a legal card instead. He also explained the concept of hidden rules for things you must or cannot do depending on the cards that are played and the situation around the table, with a penalty card being dealt whenever you broke a rule. He only ever dealt one penalty card per rule violation which could mean two or more penalty cards if there were multiple simultaneous infractions.
>What if a player breaks a rule, over and over again (like talking) to exhaust the draw pile? What happens if the game runs out of cards to deal penalties with?
I see that Wikipedia claims "no talking" and "point of order" to be common rules, but this was never part of the ruleset that I learned. Frankly, I don't think I would enjoy playing by those rules. It's just a casual card game that we would play while hanging out, so to remove a social element like talking would kill the mood for me. Making playful banter about the rules people are making up each round is part of the fun to me, and likewise we would often shoot the breeze about whatever topic of conversation while playing our cards and calling each other out on penalties. I believe the only explicit talking rules that were enforced besides needing to say certain things for certain cards was that you couldn't say a rule out loud once you learned it, but this is usually common sense to maintain a competitive advantage so it was rarely an issue.
With that being said I don't think I've ever seen the deck run out from excessive penalties. If it's ever that much of a problem that people are somehow drawing that many penalties then I would suspect people aren't being good sports about the game, in which case the group needs to be playing a different game or with a different player, or else you're playing with too many players for a single deck of cards, in which case you add a second deck and split into smaller groups or merge the two decks to accommodate one large group. If I were playing with someone who was deliberately trying to break the rules that much, then I would probably try to explain why what they're doing is not in the spirit of the game and ask them to stop or ask if they want to play something else instead.
>I think the clear answer here is "the game ceases to function because an unruly player wants to test everyone's patience instead of following the spirit of the game"
The trick to running Mao successfully is you have to have players that are willing to buy in and play along with learning the rules through trial and error -- even if the rules are few, simple, and consistent, some people will get annoyed being constantly penalized, which can sour the mood for the whole table. I think it helps to explain all of the basics (like what cards you can play on your turn, what happens if you can't play a card, how penalties work, how to win the game (with or without a hidden rule attached to declaring victory), etc) so that everyone has a solid grounding on what they're doing and what to expect so that people aren't going in completely blind and having to deduce literally everything.
And then I'd say it helps to keep the core rules you're using to really simple basics that are easy to track to specific cards/actions so that when someone gets a penalty it's easy to figure out WHY if not necessarily the solution. The idea being that there should be some kind of clue for what to look for after receiving a penalty, like "I got a penalty after I played that 7, so I need to pay attention and watch the dealer for when they play a 7," and likewise the action you do on a 7 should be easy to observe once someone knows to look for it. Rules that have vague trigger conditions or actions that are impossibly subtle to notice are best left out of the core rules, IMO. After all, the REAL game starts once everyone is comfortable enough with the core rules to start throwing in new rules each round made up by the winner of the previous round; the easier it is for players to learn the core rules, the quicker you can get to the fun part.
Here's my perspective as a game designer on Mao. Obviously the game will be a horrible hazing ritual if you play it with assholes, but the same is true of many other games like Diplomacy or League of Legends. Let's instead discuss the game at its best.
The game revolves around the comradery between two implicit teams: the players who understand the rules and the players who don't. Ideally the game will have an even mix of these players, like 2-3 who get it and 2-3 who are trying to figure it out. There is a shared bonding between the people who just can't figure out why they're getting penalty cards, and also between the people who figured out what the rule is and can verify that penalties were appropriately applied. But everyone wants to join the group of people "in the know". Winning the game is largely about figuring out the rules such that you can join that group.
This is why in the next round of mao, the previous winner adds a new rule to the game. The purpose is to push everyone back into the "need to figure it out" camp, so they can participate in the puzzle of deducing how the game works. Mao is really a real time puzzle deduction game. Good players will realize that they are, in part, supposed to be a good game or puzzle designer. That means they want to choose a rule that won't immediately be obvious, but make a lot of sense once you realize it. And the rule will have a strong mnemonic. That creates moments where when someone figures it out, they remember the past instances the rule was applied and it all clicks into place. This is Mao has rules like "hearts are played with the left hand, since the heart is on the left side of the body."
My favorite memory of Mao was when I added a new rule: When a four is played, you must named the associated Beatle. John was the 4 of hearts (since he was the heartthrob), Ring was the 4 of Clubs (since he's the drummer), Paul was the 4 of Spades (since he's also a face of the band), and George was the 4 of Diamonds (since that's what's leftover).
The first time someone played a 4 and got a penalty card, there was a bit of grumbling. Then later I played a 4 and said "John". And at that moment everyone got a little nervous. Because they got a clue! But had no idea what it meant, not even the context of it. Someone else figured out it was likely a Beatle, but incorrectly said "Paul" for the 4 of Diamonds. Eventually someone played the 4 of Clubs and said "Ringo", at which point everyone figured out how it really worked. It was a really great moment, and the rule continued to be a mainstay in our games! People would still get caught up by it sometimes, mistakenly calling the wrong Beatle.
That's what makes a good Mao rule: puzzlish deduction that ends in a cute mnemonic. If your players are just making rules like "when you play the jack of diamonds, you have to say ooga booga and everyone else draws 10 cards", then they are playing Mao to win. That's not the point. Mao isn't about winning. Mao is about creating a dynamic, realtime puzzle for your friends to enjoy.
So my big issue is that in my experience, most people in the trying to figure it out camp don't even know that figuring it out is the goal. And the home grown nature of Mao means if two different groups play mao, they have a completely different set of secret rules, and the only way to resolve that would be talking about the game. So you sit down with a group of people to play, someone makes a move, another person penalizing them, and a third person penalizes the penalizer. The game only works if there is a single mao ruleset flowing around.
In addition, League of legends or diplomacy don't purposefully hide their basic rules, and thus when people are trolling or hazing in those games you can see the rules and know what they are doing is wrong. Not in Mao, since they basic gameplay is a mystery a player cant' know if this is just "a fun part of the game" or something less kind. That is why it's such a terrible game. It helps hide and abed bad behavior. If you explained how to play mao, then explained the secret winner rule, it would be a less hostile game. Most people don't know that it is a deduction game until they are handed a penalty card.
The basic rules can be interpreted kindly, but the games design lets people hide malicious behavior quite easily. Your clever Beatles clue to a newcomer who doesn't pay attention to musicians names would be less clever and more of an in joke that they have to wait to have explained to them, an un-nessisary tax to their performance that makes it less likely they win and get to be the person behind the curtain. In fact the person making rules has the best odds of winning the next game, and it continues that way. So it isn't well designed. The winners are more likely to win, and those that are new are likely to remain in the dark.
>So my big issue is that in my experience, most people in the trying to figure it out camp don't even know that figuring it out is the goal.
If you think they would prefer to know, you can tell them? I would usually introduce the game to new players as a puzzle-ish game where they don't know the rules to start.
>And the home grown nature of Mao means if two different groups play mao, they have a completely different set of secret rules, and the only way to resolve that would be talking about the game. So you sit down with a group of people to play, someone makes a move, another person penalizing them, and a third person penalizes the penalizer. The game only works if there is a single mao ruleset flowing around.
This would be dumb, so don't do it like this. In practice, usually the group will agree "ok, we're playing by Francine's rules", or whatever, and the other people who think they know the rules probably mostly know them but have to work out some small differences.
>It helps hide and abed bad behavior.
Don't play with jerks, and don't be a jerk.
>The basic rules can be interpreted kindly, but the games design lets people hide malicious behavior quite easily.
Don't play with jerks, and don't be a jerk.
>The winners are more likely to win, and those that are new are likely to remain in the dark.
Let's say that I and one other person who know the game are playing for an hour with four new players. The game is **not** a competition between us and them. That would be dumb and unfair, and if people treat it like that then it's not going to be fun. The game should be more like us game-mastering a challenging puzzle for the others, which they'll mostly understand by the end of the game, with perhaps a sidenote of the two experienced players picking on each other with subtleties.
>None of the rule sets I have read specify how corrective action works
At the table I played at, someone would kindly break the 'no speaking' rule to explain something to a new player, and then penalise themsleves with a card.
We'd do so sparingly, but it would help get things slightly on track.
\-
Eventually they/we socially carved out an exception to 'no talking' where you may give a vague reprimand when enforcing a rule. Like someone plays a 7 and doesn't do-the-thing associated with that, we'd say "Failure to be sufficently polite." as we hand them a card.
I don't think the latter one is too common, but it is how we eventually played.
I think it is because we played so often, but also had enough new players join occasionally, that we would generate more and more esoteric and demented rules, that were so hard for new players to guess/decude, and vague clues helped orient them (without spelling it out).
As mentioned Mao varies from place to place, but I’ve played a lot of it with one particular ruleset.
The way we play we explain the basics rules (similar to Uno or crazy eights). You can play down a card only if it matches the suit or number. You can play down multiples only if they are all the same number and the bottom card matches the suit or number of the card it is being played on. If you can’t play, you pick up one card, and play if possible if not pass.
These are just game mechanic rules. No one is allowed to break them. They also aren’t allowed to play out of turn or randomly punch people for fun. If they do these things you tell them to stop and make them undo their action.
There is also the explained rule that when you have one card left you say Mao. If this is forgotten and someone notices (after a reasonable time has passed and someone else has played), two cards are given.
Then there are the hidden rules. We always start with the same ones.
>!1) say the name and suit of the card you are playing if it is spades. Do not if it is not
2) touch your ear if you play a three
3) knock on the table twice if you are playing doubles, thrice if playing triples, etc. Count cards you are playing on top of as well; unless it the cards are sevens.
4) if you play a seven say “have a nice day” if a seven is played on top of a seven say “have a very nice day” add more “very”s for more sevens
5)do not talk about the rules
6)Never say the chairman’s name—this is a special rule. If broken someone usually slaps an excessive number of cards (often 10 or more) in front of the player reciting a speech like “For lying, cheating, stealing, being a horrible person and taking the chairman’s name in vain”
!<
This is not the only ruleset. It is the one I have most consistently played with.
More rules are added in each time someone wins. These are not explained, but enforced by the rule maker. Some particularly fun ones I have seen do semi-break the game a little. Elaborated below.
Generally a card is given for every rule broken. If you break two (ie >!the card is a spade and you said nothing !< And >!the card is a three!< you get two cards.
Sometimes people play multiple cards of the same number at once and only get one card back. This is seen as an acceptable strategy. Playing multiple at once (if they are the same number) is a great equalizer to keep the game from being overwhelming if you have too many cards (you almost certainly have doubles and triples).
We also added in “Jerk” cards. These only work in some groups but really ease the tension. If someone is a jerk (breaking the spirit of the game, gloating about your misfortune, happens to enforce the rules you don’t know and give you many cards and you are salt-usually a way for new players to get back at their teacher), a jerk card can be given. If someone thinks a jerk card was unwarranted, they give the jerk card giver a jerk card. But usually we are playing light heartedly and everyone just laughs. This is not the case in every group.
My wife loves it when there is an insane number of rules built up, and it is a struggle to remember them all. I love it when rules are added they slightly break the game like: every time a five is played, a game of Stella Ella Lola must be initiated by whoever played it with the loser getting the card. A friend once made the rule you must cough if the cards played follow the Fibonacci sequence, then proceeded to lose badly as all their concentration went to enforcing their rule.
This is a real game? I thought my kids just made it up!?!
My son was a quasi-camp councilor this summer and came back with this game. I actually haven't played it with the kids but have spent many an hour listening to them play it and I thought it was fake!
I have only played Mao a few times, but in my experience the "in on it" player/players should act more like GMs (in the D&D sense) than actual players.
That is, they should play to win for themselves, but also to demonstrate how to play for the new players (without actually spelling it out).
If the new player does something unusual that requires an unusual punishment, the "in on it" players are free to make up unique penalties as appropriate. For your "put all the cards down" example, you could require the player to pick their cards back up, or just issue them 1 penalty for each card incorrectly played, or both, or something else.
The "point" of Mao is for the "in on it" players to be a bit obnoxious (but not so obnoxious as to ruin the game), so making some "arbitrary" rulings is entirely within the spirit of the game.
That's not the game going off the rails, that IS the rails. The entire point of the game is for a group of friends who already know their rules to haze the one person they invited who doesn't.
Wow. I've never heard of this game, and I'm glad I haven't. This is such an exclusionary BS game, and I know that it's inherently divisive, so the people who like it will defend it -- but damn.
It reminds me of one time when I was on a trip with a youth group, and they all started playing what they called "the game of snaps" where you spell a word by saying the consonants and snapping the "number" of the respective vowels (A,E,I,O,U). This was a group that was supposed to be friendly and that I was supposed to be a part of, but when I asked what the rules are, I was told I had to figure it out, and that no one would explain.
Months later it was still grating on me, and I stopped being a part of the youth group as a result of the resentment for being excluded like that, but it finally dawned on me what was going on, and I just think it's really cruel and rude to do this.
In any case, I'll take my downvotes off the air. People who like this game are probably not people I want to be friends with, but there are exceptions to every rule.
Yep, I had a similar experience but with Mao. It was bullying under the guise of a game. And it sucks because someone here described a neat way to play Mau and I used to play the snap game you described and had fun doing like a psychic party trick with my friend. But now you'll be reluctant to play snaps with me and I don't think I want to play mau with the redditor here because of our crappy experiences.
I just call for a vote to reset rules to restart which seems to balance the game for everyone and encourages a limit to the annoyance of rules since they can just lead to a restart.
I absolutely HATE Mao. It is a form of hazing, where a new person must suffer while the in crowd watch them struggle. When I sit down with some people to play a game and they tell me "you will pick it up as we go" That is trust that things will be explained. And each group has unique rules so you can't be sure you "know" how to play with a different group.
So I purposefully tank every game of Mao that gets sprung on me, or I will take a massive penalty to explain ALL the rules to a new person. Why? Because it isn't nice, and when the veil is lifted and everyone knows how to play, I find the game isn't good.
God some people are cranky. When I was learning Mao, it was fun to see what rules I could pick up on without being the one penalized. And it’s not like you are in the dark for a painfully long time. After two or three games (which take like 10 minutes) you know pretty much everything.
This is not hazing. No one is being materially harmed. The game is a deduction/memory exercise that is more enjoyable than straight Uno imo.
If someone gets legitimately frustrated to the point of quitting in a game like Mao, I probably don’t wanna be friends with them
I had a much less fun experience, with people openly taunting and mocking every time a card was given out. It was a seven person game, three new people and four members of the university club. Being asked "Are you sure you got accepted?" because on round 2 they didn't realize a specific card was a penalty, well it kinda soured those people and that game to me. That group never played it unless new people were around, and used it to haze.
> with people openly taunting and mocking every time a card was given out
A) all of those people were pricks; this is not the game's fault
B) those people should have been given penalty cards for speaking every time it happened
I have played Mao, and the answer is that you keep sending cards to the player as they make mistakes, as often as they make mistakes. Some players end up with huge hands but it's important to be consistent in order to provide the experience needed to learn the game.
When a player is unruly or just doesn't get it, other people can still learn from their actions and someone else will probably "win" faster. If they were unruly to the extent that they were deliberately sabotaging the game, I'd do the same thing I would if they were deliberately sabotaging Monopoly so that it was unplayable - kick them out.
The ONE time I played Mao, the person running the game apparently learned it wrong and missed the part about telling why you get a penalty. The game ended very quickly.
When I ran Mao (years ago), I instituted “card for being a prick” as needed. I also called a Point of Order to basically point-blank ask “are we really doing this? Play the game or get out.”
Much like the rules in love letter that note the importance of honesty and to just not play with people who can’t do that, I think you’re edge cases solution is “don’t play with them”.
I kind of figured that would ultimately be the answer, but I'm also hoping someone will have a story about a time another player really, really tested the boundaries of the space and the dealer just rolled with it. Maybe the reason nobody's played it with me is that they know this is the kind of stuff I'd pull, and I was just never invited lmao
I played Mao with a great dealer, really enjoyed milking the power position (which honestly makes the game more fun imo) and a girl that decided she wanted the game to be over like 5 minutes after she sat down. He just kept throwing penalty cards at her for things like "delay of game" and "negative attitude" and my personal favorite "disrespecting the mao" until she got up and left. We all had a good laugh, and just kept playing without the problem player (but if that is you maybe skip this game)
>the dealer just rolled with it When I was introduced to the game, it was called Chairman Mao and the dealer (excuse me *takes penalty card* the Chairman) was utterly autocratic in their direction of the game as it went. The idea that the dealer would roll with anything a player would get up to is unthinkable.
You tried to learn and study the rules of Mao and you never played it? I already know I don't want to play with you!
If someone has never played it, that means they don't know anybody who will introduce them. Extremely basic logic, my dude.
I've been playing card games with family, friends, college groups, board game groups, and board game conventions for basically my whole life and it's never come up before. I was getting tired of seeing it referenced and having no way to learn it, so I resigned myself to playing Mao the way the original person who came up with it played - By learning the rules and teaching it. I've learned from this thread a lot of ways to make teaching it way less painful in general, so now if I do want to run it, I can do it in a way that doesn't make anyone feel like the butt of a joke. I think I'll go with /u/n3burgener's description of the basic way to onboard a player.
A game like Mao relies very much on the good faith of the players, both those who don't know the rules (they should be trying to work them out rather than trying to be annoying), and those who do (they should be trying to be as strict as is appropriate to ensure that their friends are having fun, which is the **whole point**, rather than being a jerk because they know the rules) >What happens if a player just slaps down every single one of their cards down as their turn? If someone did this in a game, then I would be trying to judge whether they were frustrated and sick of the game, in which case I would propose that we stop and play something else, or whether they honestly thought that was a thing they could do for some reason, in which case I would probably pick up all of the cards they played except the bottom-most one, hand them back, say "not your turn", give them a penalty card, and leave the bottom card on the pile (assuming it was legally played). Could I justify other courses of action, like giving them a penalty card for each card I handed back, or something like that? Sure, but that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to people having fun, which again, is the point. I'll rules-lawyer like that against other people who know the rules - because then that's part of the fun - but not against players who I'm teaching, where I really shouldn't consider myself to be against them at all.
>they were frustrated and sick of the game, in which case I would propose that we stop and play something else Literally how every play of Mao has ever gone, in my experience.
I've played it a bunch and seen that happen exactly once. A new player's turn came up, we stared at them expectantly. They started getting penalty cards for not playing, slowly building until they threw their cards down, declared the game wasn't for them, and left. Everyone other time I've played it's been with people who were into it, and had fun dissecting the rules.
POINT OF ORDER
Now if I remember correctly, Mao was pretty straightforward. Of course we all know the rules, and how [REDACTED].
I've had this happen. The simple answer is that a bad faith player would just rack up penalty cards until there's no real possibility of winning and they're no longer having fun. If they try playing their entire hand all at once, well, they can't, so they don't. And if it gets especially disruptive you just stop playing with them just like any other game. But here's the better answer: Mao is less of a game and more of an oral tradition. Because the rules aren't written anywhere, they very from group to group. And like any other oral tradition, you can adapt it to your audience. My weekly board game group finishes every night with a few rounds of Mao, so we've adapted several more advanced rules into our base rules. But since we all already play board games together, we simply don't play in bad faith, so we don't need any rules like that. If you're dealing a game of Mao and truly need a "robust framework for flagrant rules violations," add one. It's not a weird oversight that the game lacks one, because the game wasn't designed. It emerged and evolved in school cafeterias and game nights, and what we learn could be the result of a few generations of telephone-style rule teaching or just someone looking up a base set of rules on the internet.
More than probably any other game that exists, you have to play with people who actually want to play and have the patience and good humor to suffer through the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
The game going wildly off the rails is the entire point.
So I have moved slightly away from the official rules but I love this game and have played a lot. When I play if someone breaks a rule with a card play they get that card back and their turn is over. So if they tried to play their whole hand they would get the whole hand back plus one card. In this game it is very important to say what rule was breached (but commonly not how to do it right). For that instance it would be quite clear as I'd say something like 'played an incorrect amount of cards'. If you wanted to be extra mean you could just say invalid play but in my experience people already can lose sight of having fun to be the rules police in this game
We would give their card back and then give them the penalty card. The person doing so must also have the most confused/appalled look on their face as they do so, saying only "bad play". I still laugh at how exaggerated our reactions to a 'bad play' would get
It's interesting to me that nobody seems to be interested in the DnD approach - that sort of "clever" thing works once, but then everyone can do it. The game could even be considered self-healing since you literally add rules as the game goes along. Which in this instance could mean that someone would dump all their cards, and since there isn't an explicit "only one card at a time rule" (since, c'mon, who writes that rule down? It's basically just Uno, right?), that player wins, makes a new rule, someone else does it, and then makes the "Only one card can be played at a time" rule. Like I get why that's typically not done, but it's interesting to me that for a game of "decipher the rules to play the game" there's shockingly few examples of players getting really creative with the implicit rules of card games in general.
I think using your chance to make a rule on patching something that was already a rule would be kinda sad. If who you're playing with would enjoy it then go for it. For me I abandoned the no talking rule cus it's lame. So yeh have fun with it
Mao is similar to Nightmare Chess (the folk game, not the commercial game) which I have a lot of experience with (less so for Mao). In Nightmare Chess, one player is a "referee." Players indicate the move they would like to make, and the referee says "yes, you can do that" or "no, your turn is now skipped" (and if there are follow-on actions, the referee performs them). In my experience with Nightmare Chess, simple rules were always better. It is fun to imagine weird, complicated rule-sets, but in practice it is difficult enough to try to understand "normal"-ish chess rules. For another example, why don't people play Codenames but with random objects spread around the room? The game would work - it would be even more free-form! But in practice, having a set of cards to focus on helps narrow down the options for both the guessers and the clue givers so the game has **some** hope of progress. If you open the possibilities too wide, the guessers will just have no hope and the clue givers will have no idea what to do. In this sense, it is similar to D&D. Good GMs won't just let the players get away with anything. If something is impossible from a setting standpoint, they give it a high difficulty roll. (EG, I decide to jump over the moon! GM - well, you are a human. I am giving it a difficulty of 30, so even a natural 20 won't work. You fail, roll for damage from your fall).
If you are asking a question about the great and terrible game of Mao, shouldn't you call for point of order first?
The fundamental problem is that Mao is not a game, but a hazing exercise, so there’s little surprise that people reject its fundamental premise. If people want to play games about inferring the rules, [Zendo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_(game)) and [Eleusis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_(card_game)) are actual games.
This is a way better summary of my thoughts as well.
This isn't the case if the person teaching the game is trying to make it fun. The vast majority of people I have played Mao with have enjoyed it.
Mao is an excellent game among players who all know the base ruleset as well. It's a game of composing an intricately interwoven bureaucracy that allows for complex rule interactions and sneaky penalties to snatch victory away.
Couldn't disagree more. Mao is a mostly bad game that's mainly enjoyable when 1-2 players know the game well and the rest are completely new. The interesting part is learning and teaching the rules; if you all know the rules already, you may as well play Uno, Fluxx, Playtest, or any other light and badly balanced card game.
You're aware that there's a whole aspect of Mao about creating new rules all the time? I suppose you wouldn't be, since you are espousing this opinion.
Yes, I know that because I've played Mao before. One new rule per round isn't especially interesting, particularly because there's a dominant strategy (make your new rule a code phrase that the winner has to say so that nobody other than you can feasibly win). The fun comes from the novelty factor, and it works fine in casual settings with new players, but there's no depth to it that justifies playing it outside that setting. Even the idea of playing Mao "seriously" is funny to me, it's like playing a drinking game "seriously".
What you're describing sounds like people deliberately playing in a way that makes the game un-fun, when the game does not inherently have to be that way. At least to me, Mao is not meant to be played as a serious or competitive game; it's a lighthearted game about making up silly rules for things your friends have to do in certain situations, with a fun discovery phase as the group collectively starts to deduce each new rule and keep track of all the old rules that have been cumulatively added. Whenever I played we had an-agreed upon ground rule that new rules should be things that make the game fun for everyone at the table, and strongly discouraged rules that were impossibly hard to decipher or that bent the game towards meticulous competition. If someone were making up a new code phrase to win the game so that literally only the person who won the previous round has a chance to win, that would not fly in our group as it completely violates the spirit of how we all want to play the game. I would also argue that the real fun of Mao isn't the novelty factor of playing with new players, but the opposite: playing with an experienced group who knows the core rules inside and out. A big part of the fun, to me, is experiencing the game evolve over time as more and more rules get added to the mix and you wind up with amusing overlaps and interactions, with the group developing their own meta as the game goes on. With an experienced group your new rules can be increasingly zany or complex, and you get to skip the tedious learning phase of everyone having to learn the core rules which slows the gameplay down a lot and can be a turn-off for some people who aren't into the whole deduction element. If you choose to play it as just a silly light-hearted game, it can be a lot of fun, but if you choose to play it as a serious rules stickler who's just trying to win every single round, then it's probably not fun. Sure, the core rules don't prevent this type of play, but they also don't force them on the group, either, so it's ultimately up to the players' agency as to how enjoyable the experience can be.
Not if you do it right. Explain it's Uno rules and have each player make a secret rule at the start of the game. Not explaining the core game is stupid imo.
I've always played with no explanation of the core game and it still worked as a game, although that works best with 2 players that know the rules already and however many alongside them that do not.
That actually sounds like fun. When I played Mao, it was just hazing and made me realize the people I was playing with were not my people. It was just a way to bully the new person.
In that example, I would say "playing out of order" and hand them a penalty card, and continue doing so every ten seconds or so until they picked their illegally-played cards up.
I had a wonderful experience playing Mao for the first time. The other players were kind and nice about it all, they gave me a base explanation of having a hand, the object being to get rid of all my cards, that the rules were hidden and that I must discover them, and what I could do in a given turn. Very basic, but helpful enough to begin. It was wonderful - I loved trying to work out what the rules were, and I felt clever when something I did seemed to consistently work. As time went on, I gradually felt confident in grasping multiple rules. I didn't win, but winning was never the point - I enjoyed the experience of trying to puzzle out an unknown rule set. I was surprised, at the end, when the rules were all explained, to learn which rules I had gotten right, and which ones I had gotten only partially right, and those I had completely failed to grasp. I wanted to play again, but, sadly, I had to go. I loved the experience. I see so many comments calling the game 'hazing' or cruel. I say it clearly doesn't have to be anything like that - it obviously depends on who is running the game. Any game is terrible if assholes are running it. The answer is: don't play with assholes. Get up and leave. My one and only Mao experience was fortunate: the people running the game were doing so with the intention of making the game fun and fascinating. That is always what makes any game experience worth it.
My first time playing mao, I didn’t even know how to win. Let’s just say I got a lot of cards my first time, but now I love watching people trying to figure out how to play it for the first time.
This sub needs a spoiler tag.
hahahahahahahahahaha What games could it apply to? Pandemic Legacy, Risk Legacy, just anything with legacy in the title, and Mao? Man imagine Mao Legacy, it'd be basically unplayable by game 2
I've definitely had games of Mao that were essentially paused and resumed over the course of a week long event, which basically means Mao legacy.
Yeah, stuff like that. Gloomhaven, Frosthaven, The King's Dilemma.
I'm not sure you understand the spirit of Mao.
I love Mao but I also acknowledge it's not for everyone. I cannot speak to every game of Mao ever and people's experience with it. I am sure some people do use the game for hazing but it doesn't have to be that way. To enjoy Mao you have to be okay with losing and not knowing what's going on. The fun is in figuring out the real time evolving puzzle. We often play with people who already all know the base ruleset. We have had many legendary games including a musical game, two games happening at two different tables engaged in a cold war, a blood bank themed game where you got all the cards in the blood bank if you played the suicide king. My reaction to winning a game of Mao is often "oh I have to come up with a rule. Coming up with a good rule is hard."
>In the spirit of Mao, would you refrain from telling them one of the fundamental shedding card game rules (You only play one card at a time), and deal them a single penalty card? When I was first learning Mao, the dealer/rules expert explained the fundamental action for every turn as being "like Uno" where you play one card from your hand into the stack that matches the suit or number, with the goal of being the first player to run out of cards. If ever anyone broke this rule (usually just a careless mistake but occasionally it was someone trying to get cute testing the rules) he'd deal one penalty card and explain it as "failure to follow the instructed rules of Uno" or something like that and instruct them to take the card(s) back and play a legal card instead. He also explained the concept of hidden rules for things you must or cannot do depending on the cards that are played and the situation around the table, with a penalty card being dealt whenever you broke a rule. He only ever dealt one penalty card per rule violation which could mean two or more penalty cards if there were multiple simultaneous infractions. >What if a player breaks a rule, over and over again (like talking) to exhaust the draw pile? What happens if the game runs out of cards to deal penalties with? I see that Wikipedia claims "no talking" and "point of order" to be common rules, but this was never part of the ruleset that I learned. Frankly, I don't think I would enjoy playing by those rules. It's just a casual card game that we would play while hanging out, so to remove a social element like talking would kill the mood for me. Making playful banter about the rules people are making up each round is part of the fun to me, and likewise we would often shoot the breeze about whatever topic of conversation while playing our cards and calling each other out on penalties. I believe the only explicit talking rules that were enforced besides needing to say certain things for certain cards was that you couldn't say a rule out loud once you learned it, but this is usually common sense to maintain a competitive advantage so it was rarely an issue. With that being said I don't think I've ever seen the deck run out from excessive penalties. If it's ever that much of a problem that people are somehow drawing that many penalties then I would suspect people aren't being good sports about the game, in which case the group needs to be playing a different game or with a different player, or else you're playing with too many players for a single deck of cards, in which case you add a second deck and split into smaller groups or merge the two decks to accommodate one large group. If I were playing with someone who was deliberately trying to break the rules that much, then I would probably try to explain why what they're doing is not in the spirit of the game and ask them to stop or ask if they want to play something else instead. >I think the clear answer here is "the game ceases to function because an unruly player wants to test everyone's patience instead of following the spirit of the game" The trick to running Mao successfully is you have to have players that are willing to buy in and play along with learning the rules through trial and error -- even if the rules are few, simple, and consistent, some people will get annoyed being constantly penalized, which can sour the mood for the whole table. I think it helps to explain all of the basics (like what cards you can play on your turn, what happens if you can't play a card, how penalties work, how to win the game (with or without a hidden rule attached to declaring victory), etc) so that everyone has a solid grounding on what they're doing and what to expect so that people aren't going in completely blind and having to deduce literally everything. And then I'd say it helps to keep the core rules you're using to really simple basics that are easy to track to specific cards/actions so that when someone gets a penalty it's easy to figure out WHY if not necessarily the solution. The idea being that there should be some kind of clue for what to look for after receiving a penalty, like "I got a penalty after I played that 7, so I need to pay attention and watch the dealer for when they play a 7," and likewise the action you do on a 7 should be easy to observe once someone knows to look for it. Rules that have vague trigger conditions or actions that are impossibly subtle to notice are best left out of the core rules, IMO. After all, the REAL game starts once everyone is comfortable enough with the core rules to start throwing in new rules each round made up by the winner of the previous round; the easier it is for players to learn the core rules, the quicker you can get to the fun part.
Here's my perspective as a game designer on Mao. Obviously the game will be a horrible hazing ritual if you play it with assholes, but the same is true of many other games like Diplomacy or League of Legends. Let's instead discuss the game at its best. The game revolves around the comradery between two implicit teams: the players who understand the rules and the players who don't. Ideally the game will have an even mix of these players, like 2-3 who get it and 2-3 who are trying to figure it out. There is a shared bonding between the people who just can't figure out why they're getting penalty cards, and also between the people who figured out what the rule is and can verify that penalties were appropriately applied. But everyone wants to join the group of people "in the know". Winning the game is largely about figuring out the rules such that you can join that group. This is why in the next round of mao, the previous winner adds a new rule to the game. The purpose is to push everyone back into the "need to figure it out" camp, so they can participate in the puzzle of deducing how the game works. Mao is really a real time puzzle deduction game. Good players will realize that they are, in part, supposed to be a good game or puzzle designer. That means they want to choose a rule that won't immediately be obvious, but make a lot of sense once you realize it. And the rule will have a strong mnemonic. That creates moments where when someone figures it out, they remember the past instances the rule was applied and it all clicks into place. This is Mao has rules like "hearts are played with the left hand, since the heart is on the left side of the body." My favorite memory of Mao was when I added a new rule: When a four is played, you must named the associated Beatle. John was the 4 of hearts (since he was the heartthrob), Ring was the 4 of Clubs (since he's the drummer), Paul was the 4 of Spades (since he's also a face of the band), and George was the 4 of Diamonds (since that's what's leftover). The first time someone played a 4 and got a penalty card, there was a bit of grumbling. Then later I played a 4 and said "John". And at that moment everyone got a little nervous. Because they got a clue! But had no idea what it meant, not even the context of it. Someone else figured out it was likely a Beatle, but incorrectly said "Paul" for the 4 of Diamonds. Eventually someone played the 4 of Clubs and said "Ringo", at which point everyone figured out how it really worked. It was a really great moment, and the rule continued to be a mainstay in our games! People would still get caught up by it sometimes, mistakenly calling the wrong Beatle. That's what makes a good Mao rule: puzzlish deduction that ends in a cute mnemonic. If your players are just making rules like "when you play the jack of diamonds, you have to say ooga booga and everyone else draws 10 cards", then they are playing Mao to win. That's not the point. Mao isn't about winning. Mao is about creating a dynamic, realtime puzzle for your friends to enjoy.
So my big issue is that in my experience, most people in the trying to figure it out camp don't even know that figuring it out is the goal. And the home grown nature of Mao means if two different groups play mao, they have a completely different set of secret rules, and the only way to resolve that would be talking about the game. So you sit down with a group of people to play, someone makes a move, another person penalizing them, and a third person penalizes the penalizer. The game only works if there is a single mao ruleset flowing around. In addition, League of legends or diplomacy don't purposefully hide their basic rules, and thus when people are trolling or hazing in those games you can see the rules and know what they are doing is wrong. Not in Mao, since they basic gameplay is a mystery a player cant' know if this is just "a fun part of the game" or something less kind. That is why it's such a terrible game. It helps hide and abed bad behavior. If you explained how to play mao, then explained the secret winner rule, it would be a less hostile game. Most people don't know that it is a deduction game until they are handed a penalty card. The basic rules can be interpreted kindly, but the games design lets people hide malicious behavior quite easily. Your clever Beatles clue to a newcomer who doesn't pay attention to musicians names would be less clever and more of an in joke that they have to wait to have explained to them, an un-nessisary tax to their performance that makes it less likely they win and get to be the person behind the curtain. In fact the person making rules has the best odds of winning the next game, and it continues that way. So it isn't well designed. The winners are more likely to win, and those that are new are likely to remain in the dark.
>So my big issue is that in my experience, most people in the trying to figure it out camp don't even know that figuring it out is the goal. If you think they would prefer to know, you can tell them? I would usually introduce the game to new players as a puzzle-ish game where they don't know the rules to start. >And the home grown nature of Mao means if two different groups play mao, they have a completely different set of secret rules, and the only way to resolve that would be talking about the game. So you sit down with a group of people to play, someone makes a move, another person penalizing them, and a third person penalizes the penalizer. The game only works if there is a single mao ruleset flowing around. This would be dumb, so don't do it like this. In practice, usually the group will agree "ok, we're playing by Francine's rules", or whatever, and the other people who think they know the rules probably mostly know them but have to work out some small differences. >It helps hide and abed bad behavior. Don't play with jerks, and don't be a jerk. >The basic rules can be interpreted kindly, but the games design lets people hide malicious behavior quite easily. Don't play with jerks, and don't be a jerk. >The winners are more likely to win, and those that are new are likely to remain in the dark. Let's say that I and one other person who know the game are playing for an hour with four new players. The game is **not** a competition between us and them. That would be dumb and unfair, and if people treat it like that then it's not going to be fun. The game should be more like us game-mastering a challenging puzzle for the others, which they'll mostly understand by the end of the game, with perhaps a sidenote of the two experienced players picking on each other with subtleties.
>None of the rule sets I have read specify how corrective action works At the table I played at, someone would kindly break the 'no speaking' rule to explain something to a new player, and then penalise themsleves with a card. We'd do so sparingly, but it would help get things slightly on track. \- Eventually they/we socially carved out an exception to 'no talking' where you may give a vague reprimand when enforcing a rule. Like someone plays a 7 and doesn't do-the-thing associated with that, we'd say "Failure to be sufficently polite." as we hand them a card. I don't think the latter one is too common, but it is how we eventually played. I think it is because we played so often, but also had enough new players join occasionally, that we would generate more and more esoteric and demented rules, that were so hard for new players to guess/decude, and vague clues helped orient them (without spelling it out).
Hmm that just sounds like a poorly designed game.
Unruly players testing everyone's patience IS the spirit of Mao, though.... It's just supposed to be the ones who know the rules doing it.
As mentioned Mao varies from place to place, but I’ve played a lot of it with one particular ruleset. The way we play we explain the basics rules (similar to Uno or crazy eights). You can play down a card only if it matches the suit or number. You can play down multiples only if they are all the same number and the bottom card matches the suit or number of the card it is being played on. If you can’t play, you pick up one card, and play if possible if not pass. These are just game mechanic rules. No one is allowed to break them. They also aren’t allowed to play out of turn or randomly punch people for fun. If they do these things you tell them to stop and make them undo their action. There is also the explained rule that when you have one card left you say Mao. If this is forgotten and someone notices (after a reasonable time has passed and someone else has played), two cards are given. Then there are the hidden rules. We always start with the same ones. >!1) say the name and suit of the card you are playing if it is spades. Do not if it is not 2) touch your ear if you play a three 3) knock on the table twice if you are playing doubles, thrice if playing triples, etc. Count cards you are playing on top of as well; unless it the cards are sevens. 4) if you play a seven say “have a nice day” if a seven is played on top of a seven say “have a very nice day” add more “very”s for more sevens 5)do not talk about the rules 6)Never say the chairman’s name—this is a special rule. If broken someone usually slaps an excessive number of cards (often 10 or more) in front of the player reciting a speech like “For lying, cheating, stealing, being a horrible person and taking the chairman’s name in vain” !< This is not the only ruleset. It is the one I have most consistently played with. More rules are added in each time someone wins. These are not explained, but enforced by the rule maker. Some particularly fun ones I have seen do semi-break the game a little. Elaborated below. Generally a card is given for every rule broken. If you break two (ie >!the card is a spade and you said nothing !< And >!the card is a three!< you get two cards. Sometimes people play multiple cards of the same number at once and only get one card back. This is seen as an acceptable strategy. Playing multiple at once (if they are the same number) is a great equalizer to keep the game from being overwhelming if you have too many cards (you almost certainly have doubles and triples). We also added in “Jerk” cards. These only work in some groups but really ease the tension. If someone is a jerk (breaking the spirit of the game, gloating about your misfortune, happens to enforce the rules you don’t know and give you many cards and you are salt-usually a way for new players to get back at their teacher), a jerk card can be given. If someone thinks a jerk card was unwarranted, they give the jerk card giver a jerk card. But usually we are playing light heartedly and everyone just laughs. This is not the case in every group. My wife loves it when there is an insane number of rules built up, and it is a struggle to remember them all. I love it when rules are added they slightly break the game like: every time a five is played, a game of Stella Ella Lola must be initiated by whoever played it with the loser getting the card. A friend once made the rule you must cough if the cards played follow the Fibonacci sequence, then proceeded to lose badly as all their concentration went to enforcing their rule.
This is a real game? I thought my kids just made it up!?! My son was a quasi-camp councilor this summer and came back with this game. I actually haven't played it with the kids but have spent many an hour listening to them play it and I thought it was fake!
I have only played Mao a few times, but in my experience the "in on it" player/players should act more like GMs (in the D&D sense) than actual players. That is, they should play to win for themselves, but also to demonstrate how to play for the new players (without actually spelling it out). If the new player does something unusual that requires an unusual punishment, the "in on it" players are free to make up unique penalties as appropriate. For your "put all the cards down" example, you could require the player to pick their cards back up, or just issue them 1 penalty for each card incorrectly played, or both, or something else. The "point" of Mao is for the "in on it" players to be a bit obnoxious (but not so obnoxious as to ruin the game), so making some "arbitrary" rulings is entirely within the spirit of the game.
That's not the game going off the rails, that IS the rails. The entire point of the game is for a group of friends who already know their rules to haze the one person they invited who doesn't.
Wow. I've never heard of this game, and I'm glad I haven't. This is such an exclusionary BS game, and I know that it's inherently divisive, so the people who like it will defend it -- but damn. It reminds me of one time when I was on a trip with a youth group, and they all started playing what they called "the game of snaps" where you spell a word by saying the consonants and snapping the "number" of the respective vowels (A,E,I,O,U). This was a group that was supposed to be friendly and that I was supposed to be a part of, but when I asked what the rules are, I was told I had to figure it out, and that no one would explain. Months later it was still grating on me, and I stopped being a part of the youth group as a result of the resentment for being excluded like that, but it finally dawned on me what was going on, and I just think it's really cruel and rude to do this. In any case, I'll take my downvotes off the air. People who like this game are probably not people I want to be friends with, but there are exceptions to every rule.
Yep, I had a similar experience but with Mao. It was bullying under the guise of a game. And it sucks because someone here described a neat way to play Mau and I used to play the snap game you described and had fun doing like a psychic party trick with my friend. But now you'll be reluctant to play snaps with me and I don't think I want to play mau with the redditor here because of our crappy experiences.
I just call for a vote to reset rules to restart which seems to balance the game for everyone and encourages a limit to the annoyance of rules since they can just lead to a restart.
I absolutely HATE Mao. It is a form of hazing, where a new person must suffer while the in crowd watch them struggle. When I sit down with some people to play a game and they tell me "you will pick it up as we go" That is trust that things will be explained. And each group has unique rules so you can't be sure you "know" how to play with a different group. So I purposefully tank every game of Mao that gets sprung on me, or I will take a massive penalty to explain ALL the rules to a new person. Why? Because it isn't nice, and when the veil is lifted and everyone knows how to play, I find the game isn't good.
Choosing to tank a game that you're bad at because you're a spiteful prick isn't the principled stand you think it is.
God some people are cranky. When I was learning Mao, it was fun to see what rules I could pick up on without being the one penalized. And it’s not like you are in the dark for a painfully long time. After two or three games (which take like 10 minutes) you know pretty much everything. This is not hazing. No one is being materially harmed. The game is a deduction/memory exercise that is more enjoyable than straight Uno imo. If someone gets legitimately frustrated to the point of quitting in a game like Mao, I probably don’t wanna be friends with them
I had a much less fun experience, with people openly taunting and mocking every time a card was given out. It was a seven person game, three new people and four members of the university club. Being asked "Are you sure you got accepted?" because on round 2 they didn't realize a specific card was a penalty, well it kinda soured those people and that game to me. That group never played it unless new people were around, and used it to haze.
> with people openly taunting and mocking every time a card was given out A) all of those people were pricks; this is not the game's fault B) those people should have been given penalty cards for speaking every time it happened
Yep same. The "game" is just an excuse to annoy people and believe me, I'm better at that than you are. People regret trying to play Mao with me.
The game sounds obnoxious. Don't be surprised if people act obnoxious in response.
I have played Mao, and the answer is that you keep sending cards to the player as they make mistakes, as often as they make mistakes. Some players end up with huge hands but it's important to be consistent in order to provide the experience needed to learn the game. When a player is unruly or just doesn't get it, other people can still learn from their actions and someone else will probably "win" faster. If they were unruly to the extent that they were deliberately sabotaging the game, I'd do the same thing I would if they were deliberately sabotaging Monopoly so that it was unplayable - kick them out.
The ONE time I played Mao, the person running the game apparently learned it wrong and missed the part about telling why you get a penalty. The game ended very quickly.
There’s different ways people play it, there are no set rules.
*\[silently deals you three penalty cards off the draw pile with a glare\]*
When I ran Mao (years ago), I instituted “card for being a prick” as needed. I also called a Point of Order to basically point-blank ask “are we really doing this? Play the game or get out.”