Goofing About in an Airport

We were away in Ireland over Christmas and on the way back we found ourselves with a few hours to kill in Dublin airport, given our tendency to schedule travel very conservatively, so when everything runs on time we end up with space to fill.  My daughter, Miss B, and I spent a little while improvising a card game, which turned out to be good, if chaotic fun.

This is how things went...  We started with a pen each and some blank cards (kit I usually have with me while travelling).  We could either write whatever we liked on a card, or (later on) use a card made earlier in the game, and we would each select our card for the round simultaneously.  Once we had both chosen our card, we would reveal the cards and decide who had won.  The winner would take both played cards into their hand, but could not use them again immediately.

Some of our cards. Beautifully presented they are not.

At first things were a bit random (the first two cards were "An Elephant Wearing a Cowboy Hat" and "Squirrel Girl"), but as we went on, we started to create cards that could give more flexibility or special effects, or provided a counter to an earlier card (Squirrel Girl, being naturally unbeatable, is nevertheless vulnerable to "Delicious Nuts That Make You Go To Sleep").  Where a winner was not clear, we just discussed and decided between us -- with my wife, S, as an impartial judge when we weren't sure.

Obviously this is just a bit of dumb fun, and it was a great way to pass a bit of time, but it seems (in principle, at least) a good way to organically develop some card interactions, particularly if we crack the cards out again and continue to expand the game using a combination of pre-existing cards and, probably, a limited number of blank cards each time.  We fully intend to do this in the future.

This game is actually fairly similar to one called 1000 Blank White Cards, which usually starts in a Fluxx-like "draw 1, play 1" pattern and then can go off in any direction from there, and again uses a combination of blank cards (which you can turn into anything you want when you have them) and pre-existing cards created during a previous play.

1000BWC in turn derives from Nomic, a game where the rules change during play due to player votes, and I assume the commercially-produced Fluxx must have been inspired by one or more of these other games.

In just the limited amount of play we had of our little game, we quickly started seeing a metagame emerge, and if we do play some more, I would expect that to continue.  I really don't know what to expect, but I think this is the point.  I think it's a little like doing improv workshops to develop acting: just learning to roll with whatever happens is valuable in itself.