Radically Simplified Rules for Nanofictionary
By Andrew Looney, May, 2010
Overview
In 2002, Looney Labs published a card game called Nanofictionary. It featured a great system of dividing story elements into card types, but the actual gameplay is clumsy and flawed. It's been out of print since 2005.
In 2008, I first started trying to redesign the game. The ideas I had at that time were interesting, but they didn't go far enough.
Over the course of the past 2 years, we've been re-working most of the rest of our product line so that everything we publish now has a consistent style and packaging format. Although the date is not yet set, we eventually plan to republish Nanofictionary in the new style, and with greatly simplified rules.
Nanofictionary 2.0 will feature a narrower card size (matching Fluxx and Chrononauts) instead of the wider (poker-sized) cards in the original edition. It will also contain 100 cards instead of 110 cards; the Action cards and the Award cards will be eliminated, allowing for the addition of 14 new story content cards.
Below is the most recent version of the rules I'm planning to include someday in Nanofictionary 2.0. These rules may or may not be final. If you are interested in playtesting these rules and you don't have a First Edition Nanofictionary deck, you can get what you need by ordering 10 packs of NanoBlanxx and creating your own deck using Sharpies and the original edition's card list. (You'll also need a set of number cards, just 6 cards with the numbers 1-6 on them. Playing cards work fine.)
How To Play
Here are actual rules:
- Number of Players: 3-6
- Set aside the Actions and Award cards. They will not be used.
- Shuffle the deck and deal everyone a hand of 6 cards.
- Also, deal 6 cards face up and spread them out on the table.
- On your turn, draw a card, add it to your hand, and discard a card.
- When drawing, you may choose the top card of the draw pile, or any card in the discard pile.
- Feel free to spread out the discarded cards and sort them by type.
- If you don't like your hand, you can discard all of your cards and draw 6 new ones as your turn.
- You may declare stop at the end of your turn, but only if you have at least one of each of the four types of cards.
- When you stop, take the best Number card available, then wait for the others to do the same.
- When you get down to the last player, that player gets one final turn and must then be done (even if they don't have one of each type of card).
- Once everyone has gone out, players take turns presenting their story ideas. Go in the same order you took your number cards.
- Remember that these should be nano stories. To keep your story short, imagine that we are pitching movie concepts to a busy Hollywood executive. He has a short attention span and just wants to know what the stories would be about. He does not want to hear all the details.
- It's OK to invent extra Characters, Problems, etc as needed to fill in the gaps, but don't go overboard, and be sure to incorporate all of the cards in your set.
- After all have presented their story ideas, players vote for their favorites. You cannot vote for yourself, and you get only one vote. When you are ready to vote, raise your hand. On the count of "1-2-3-go," everyone points at another player. Most popular story idea wins!
- Ties are broken by the players' number cards, i.e. whichever player finished first is the winner.
New Cards
As noted above, version 2 will include 14 new story cards. You can totally play without these, but for those who want to know exactly what's in my playtest deck, here it is:
- The Smallest Mouse
- The Easy-Going Bear That Everyone Likes
- The SPAZ!!!
- The Returning Champion
- The Pyramids
- The Observatory
- A convention
- The Big Question
- The reactor is about to melt down
- Something just wasn't right
- They got it fixed just in time!
- Earth was welcomed into the Galactic Federation
- Everything was cool.
- She said, "Yes!"
