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Last Modified: May 16 2008 at 10:57
Preparing for the Second Edition: As I described in a recent LiveJournal posting, I'm planning to revise the rules to Nanofictionary before we reprint it. On this page is my most recent working ruleset. If you've got a copy of the First Edition, please give these new rules a try and let us know what you think!
Motivation for Changes: The goal of this redesign is to dramatically shorten and simplify the Writing Phase of the game. As it says on page 10 of the rules booklet, the fun doesn't really begin until the StoryTelling phase. So why is so much of the game spent in the slow and tedious Writing phase?
The New Way of Writing: Gone is the whole card-drawing & turn-taking mechanism. The new version is much more holistic... you get a bunch of story ideas, mix them up a little as needed, choose a subset to use for a story, and boom we're on to the fun part!
The following material is a total replacement for pages 4-9 of the rulebook:
Before Starting: Remove all the purple Action cards from the deck. They are now useful only as Honorable Mention cards (during the Scoring Phase).
Setup: Shuffle the deck and deal 8 cards to each player. Then place 16 cards face up in the center of the table. Set the rest of the deck aside. Stack up the Number cards in the center of the table (enough for each player) with the highest valued card on top.
Writing Phase: The first part of the game has a free-form structure during which all players prepare to tell a story:
Continue as before at this point -- the Storytelling and Scoring phases haven't changed.
As long as we're planning a major revision with an as-yet unfinalized total card count, I'm feeling free to make a list of new card ideas I'd like to squeeze in. Here's what I've got so far:
Meanwhile, are there any cards we should cut? What are people's least favorites?
Steven Hoffman wrote:
I will say one of my favorite things in Nanofictionary was using plagiarism to steal my opponents story cards and make them go scrambling to find another one that fits as well. I think the biggest challenge, and hence the most rewarding thing to overcome, was having story elements that you didn't think fit together, either because of a hand lacking a type of card(so you needed to take the one you find), or because of the theft of a card you were counting on.
I think that these difficulties made the game more fun, and I would personally hate to see all action cards removed for this reason. As it stand, without having tested it mind you, I feel that it would be too easy to write a story your comfortable with instead of the story the cards force you to tell.
Andy's Reply:
Thanks for writing and sharing your input. Nothing's set in stone and we'll see where these revision ideas take us, but it's a sad fact of game design that mechanics which some players really enjoy simply don't work and must be cut.
(My favorite example here is the Freeing move in IceTowers. This was an option in which the player who had both the top and bottom pieces in a tower could "Free" the bottom piece by simply lifting off the rest of the tower and setting it down. This was a very satisfying action but it broke the game so we had to drop it.)
Plagiarism suffers from what I call the Lose a Turn problem. Fluxx experts will recall that the First Edition contained a card by that name, which was replaced with Take Another Turn in subsequent editions. Why the change? Lose a Turn is a fun action to use on someone else, but it's no fun when it happens to you. Consider this formula:
Total_Fun = My_Fun + Your_Fun + Player_X's_Fun
Playing a card like Lose a Turn may provide a high value for My_Fun, but a negative value for Your_Fun (with external players not caring much either way). Depending on the situation (a six player game, for example) Your_Fun may lose our total a lot of points, and there comes a time at which it's just not worth it. In this case, Take Another Turn is a nice solution since it provides a similar feeling but without as many negative values in the equation.
In the case of plagiarism, we have to weigh the fun you have by stealing my plot device against the loss of fun I experience by losing that element and needing to find something to replace it etc. I hear what you're saying about the fun of using the card, and even about the fun of embracing the challenge of recovering from being stolen from. However, it can be pretty seriously game-ruining to have built a whole plan around a particular card and then have that card swiped just as you were about to call your story done. At the end of the day, I'm a lot more interested in letting the players build satisfying stories they have fun telling, than in increasing a challenge which, for many players, is already daunting enough.
A final point to consider about this card is the message it contains. In retrospect I regret this Action more than any other. I've been taken to task by teachers for this card, and rightly so: what kind of message is it for a game about creative writing to suggest that the best way to get ahead is by stealing other people's ideas?
Anyway, I'm sorry if the version we eventually settle on leaves out some aspect you enjoyed, but the good of the game overall may require it. I realize that may be difficult to accept, but those who remember the old Wall rules from Icehouse (and how hard it was for us to decide to drop those) realize that I know what I'm talking about.
Incidentally, one of my reasons for wanting to radically change these rules is that I've never really felt Nano was as good as it could be. I still vividly recall a couple of playtest sessions that had a certain magic to them which I felt we lost in later redesigns and never really captured. (Like a dislocated Chrononaut I'm still trying to find my way back to something dear I accidentally erased.)
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