Known games
47 entries, in the order the knowledge base holds them.
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Pig — the dice push
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Push your luck in its plainest form: after every roll, keep what you have or risk it for more. Change one number, the bust or the target, and the whole table plays more boldly or more carefully.
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Three-card Hanabi — hidden hands and clues
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Hidden hands turned inside out: you see everyone's cards except your own, so the team depends on a few limited clues. It shows how a limit on talking can become the whole game.
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The blocking grid — workers fight for spots
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Worker placement at its smallest: taking a spot denies it to the other player. It shows how turn order and denial create decisions even with no luck at all.
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Werewolf-5 — find the traitor
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A game made almost entirely of what players say about each other. It shows hidden identity, and how a single liar changes every conversation at the table.
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Paper auction — bid for the prize
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Bidding with a budget that never refills: every token spent now is gone later. It shows how players come to price the same prize differently as their money runs down.
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Pick-and-pass — the drafting game
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Drafting: each card you keep is also a choice about what your neighbour gets. It shows how passing cards along turns every pick into a gift or a block.
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Last-card-out — race to empty your hand
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A race where what you hold limits what you can do. It shows hand management, and how one flexible card (the wild) changes every decision around it.
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Nim — take the last stone
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No luck and nothing hidden, yet the winner is often settled many moves before the end by a pattern the players can't yet see. It shows why designers add uncertainty to a game that can be solved.
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Raja Mantri Chor Sipahi — find the thief
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Four hidden roles and one guess: the whole game is reading faces. It shows how little rule a hidden-identity game needs, and how points can give each role a different stake.
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Gulaam Chor — don't be left with the Jack
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One loser, no winner, and almost no choices, yet real tension, carried by a single card that can never pair. It shows how a game can work on feeling more than decision.
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Satte pe Satta — build out from the sevens
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Everyone builds the same rows, and holding a card back blocks the others. It shows interaction through a shared board instead of direct attack.
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Dots and Boxes — close the square
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A rule that lets you move again after closing a box turns a simple drawing game into one of sacrifice and long chains. It shows how one rule can create deep strategy.
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Battleship on paper — find the hidden fleet
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Each yes-or-no answer narrows where the ships can be. It shows deduction on a hidden map, and how the size of the board sets how much luck there is at the start.
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Bulls and Cows — crack the code
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Pure deduction from counted clues. It shows how much information a single answer can carry, and how a guess can be made to learn rather than to win.
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Cheat — play face down, lie if you like
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Every claim may be false, and calling a lie costs whoever is wrong. It shows how risk on both sides keeps bluffing honest.
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Spoons — grab a coin when someone makes four
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A quiet card game that ends in a scramble, with one fewer coin than players. It shows how adding a physical race to a hidden race changes what players watch.
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Cram — the last domino wins
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On boards with even sides the second player always wins by copying. It shows how symmetry can break a game, and how changing the board fixes it.
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SOS — write S or O, make SOS
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Both players write the same letters, so anything you write can help your opponent. It shows how shared pieces create tactics of giving and avoiding.
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Three Men's Morris — three in a row, then move
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Placing pieces, then moving them: a second phase keeps a tic-tac-toe-like game from ending in a draw. It shows phases as a design tool.
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Set — three that all match or all differ
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Everyone looks at the same cards at once, with no turns, so perception wins over planning. It shows simultaneous play, and how a single matching rule can carry a whole game.
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3 Quarters — complete the three-quarter circle
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Every piece placed can complete someone else's circle, so each move weighs your gain against what it gives away, under a 20-second clock. It shows interaction through a shared board, and time as pressure.
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All or Nothing — play a slice, win a pizza
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Completing the pizza early scores fewer points, so waiting is rewarded. It shows how one scoring rule can turn a simple arithmetic race into a game of pushing your luck.
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Eleusis — guess the dealer's secret rule
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The rules themselves are what you discover. Players learn by testing guesses against right and wrong, which is how a designer learns what a rule does. The Rulemaker also feels the balance: a rule nobody finds is as dull as one everyone finds at once.
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Mao — the rules nobody will tell you
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Hidden rules turn every penalty into evidence. It shows how players build a model of a game from feedback alone, and how much frustration a design can carry before it stops being fun.
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Nomic — change the rules as you play
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Changing the rules is the move. It makes visible what every designer does between playtests, and shows that every rule serves someone more than others.
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The Mind — play in order, without a word
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With speech removed, the only channel left is timing. Players build a shared rhythm, which shows how a rule that takes something away can make a new kind of play.
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Exquisite Corpse — draw a body nobody planned
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Concealment makes collaboration surprising. It shows how hiding information between players can produce something nobody could have made alone, and a game with no winner that people still want to play again.
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Consequences — a story written blind
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A fixed sequence of prompts is a story's structure; the players only fill it in. It shows how much of a narrative game comes from its frame rather than its players.
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Racetrack — drive a car on squared paper
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One rule about momentum makes every move depend on the last. It shows how a simple physical constraint creates planning, risk and a track that the players draw themselves.
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Sprouts — the drawing that ends itself
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The board is drawn by the players, and the moves close the board in. It shows how a game can be made of its own map, and how a growing picture can carry the state of a game.
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Hex — connect your two sides
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Every move is both an attack and a defence, because the same chain that connects one player blocks the other. It shows how a geometric fact can rule out draws, and how the swap rule balances first-player advantage.
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Sim — don't make a triangle
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A game about avoiding, not achieving. It shows a misère goal, and a mathematical guarantee: with six dots someone must make a triangle, so the game always ends.
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Chomp — don't eat the poisoned square
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The first player can always win, yet on most bars nobody knows how. It shows the difference between knowing a strategy exists and finding it, which is often where play lives.
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Kayles — knock down one pin or two
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Each move can break one game into several smaller games. It shows how a position can be a sum of separate parts, a way of thinking that helps in designing any game with independent areas.
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Quantum tic-tac-toe — marks in two places at once
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Each move is uncertain until a later moment decides it, and the decision is handed to the opponent. It shows how a game can be built to teach an idea from science, with delayed effects as its main mechanism.
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Ultimate tic-tac-toe — your move sends them
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Each move has two meanings: a mark here and an instruction to the other player. It shows how linking small games turns a solved children's game into one that rewards foresight.
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Paper soccer — bounce the ball to goal
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Every line drawn changes what can be drawn next, and old moves create new ones through bouncing. It shows how a game's history can live on the board and become its strategy.
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Mū Tōrere — the Māori star game
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A board with a single empty point makes every move a question of who gets stuck. It shows how one restriction, the centre rule, can keep a tiny game from being won at once.
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Aadu Puli Attam — goats against tigers
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Two sides with different pieces, different moves and different goals. It shows asymmetric design: balance comes from tuning numbers such as goats needed and capture counts, not from giving both sides the same thing.
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Moksha Patam — the board that teaches
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A game made entirely of chance that still carries a meaning, because every square is labelled. It shows how a board's words can make players read luck as a lesson, and how rules can make an argument.
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The Royal Game of Ur — race through the shared middle
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A race with a shared middle, where luck decides the distance and you decide which piece to risk. It shows how a few special squares, the rosettes, shape the whole flow of a game.
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Senet — the journey across thirty squares
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A game whose rules were lost and had to be reconstructed from boards and texts. It shows that any set of rules is a choice, and how a path, a few special squares and a swap rule can carry meaning about a journey.
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Kemps — tell your partner without a word
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Information has to cross between partners through a hidden channel, while the other team tries to read it too. It shows how a game can be about communication itself, and how a forbidden channel (speech) pushes play into another.
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Liar's Dice — bid on dice you can't see
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Every bid is a claim you can't check without risking a die. It shows how bluffing works when information is shared but hidden, and how a game tightens as each loss shrinks what you know.
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Cuttle — the first fighting card game
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A small deck carrying many card powers, each answering another. It shows how a designer gives every card a role, builds counters into the rules, and makes a race into a fight.
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Mendikot — win the tens
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Trick-taking with a single prize: the tens. It shows how a game can strip a big system down to one thing to fight over, and how partnerships form a silent conversation through the cards played.
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Penney's game — the second chooser wins
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A game that looks fair and isn't. It shows how probability can surprise players, and why designers test balance instead of trusting how a rule looks.