WHAT IS NEEDED TO PLAY
From one to trillions upon trillions of egos (sentient and not) are needed to take part as players in the game. Not all egos will care to play, but with proper cultural tactics, many (even most gods!) can be coerced into believing that "it’s what life is all about".

One Universe will be used as a playing board. It should be noted that many players are content to play miniature versions of the game, complaining that the playing board for the real game is too big, or that the game lasts too long. These infinitesimally smaller games (often involving a playing area as puny as a galaxy) can also be quite fun, but lack the richness and challenge of a complete game. Typically, creatures such as roaches and bacteria win the "planetary" melees, and the game is cut to only a few billion years.

Various multitudes of playing pieces, complete with googolplexes of galaxies, quasars, evil minions, black holes, fortune cookies, atoms, rainbows, plagues, times, dreams, etc., will be used in the game as pawns, cards, and dice. If the Universe you happen to be using contains actual pawns, cards, and dice, these may be used in the game as well.

Finally, plenty of individualized ego-tags are needed for the game. An ego-tag is whatever physical or metaphysical label a player chooses to mark game pieces as belonging to, visited by, or used by him/her/it.

OBJECT OF THE GAME
The goal for any one player is to take over the playing board (i.e. the Universe) with playing pieces that have the player’s ego-tags attached—before the playing board swallows itself up. No one has ever actually won a game of EGO-TAG, though in one game a particularly disgruntled player whom we will call George actually managed to tip the playing board over, and half of the playing pieces were lost to the void. George declared himself victor. The surviving players declared George a "poor sport" and put the rest of the game away in its box, where it has been sitting, unfinished, for a very long time. But that’s a different story.

STRATEGIES
As a player, your realistic goal should be to take over enough of the playing board that you feel you have accomplished something. This sadly is also an impossible goal for most players; typically the only players who attain any post-game satisfaction are the ones who refuse to believe they are playing the game in the first place.

A plethora of ego-tagging techniques have been developed through the history of EGO-TAG. Graffiti has been used in almost every game (example: "Kilroy was here" written on a playing piece tags the piece for Kilroy [who, BTW, is an excellent EGO-TAG player {in one stupendous game, he actually almost won by getting trillions of other players to mark things for him!}]).

For some players, ownership (e.g. declaring loudly that, "all gas planets are mine, so stop putting graffiti on ‘em, or I will kill your whole family") is enough to tag many playing pieces, although pieces can end up quite cluttered by ego-tags when ownership disputes arise. Ownership disputes can be quite messy.

Other players have used the creation method, whereby they convince most nearby players that "whatever thou createth is thine". This also can present difficulties, as often creations develop egos of their own, and thereafter become competing players in the game. And a Universe containing billions of monkey-like creatures who at any moment are creating all manner of similar plays, poetry, robots, songs, etc. can saturate quickly with patent lawyers.

A curious merging of the two previous methods (ownership and creation) produces the typically more accepted, but also more temporary technique of ego-tagging, called coding. In coding, a player finds a molecular sequence which is abundant in the player’s main playing piece (sometimes referred to as his/her/its "body") and uses the ownership and/or creation method to ego-tag other playing pieces that have similar molecular codes. Unfortunately this method only works for a hundred thousand years or so (at the most) and degenerates quickly due to evolution and extinction of the molecular sequences. Coding often works best when a system of ancestral worship or messianic religion carries the ego-tag through the lives of all player/pieces involved. A player has better chances if she/he/it uses a non-mutating molecular sequence for coding, such as hydrocarbon, but this requires great charisma on the part of the architect of the religion.

Yet another method is to attempt to tag the entire board at once. This method, sometimes dubbed finding nirvana is surprisingly enough not against the rules. However, it has never been known to work, as the few successful players who have succeeded in "becoming one with the all" finally see the playing board, the table, and then, wandering into the kitchen, find the beer. This is counted as a forfeiture. But we hear that the beer is very tasty.