Welcome to BlogNomic, a self-modifying game where changing the rules is a move. Players make blog posts proposing alterations to the ruleset, discussing and casting votes in the comments: if enough vote in favour, the rules are changed and play continues.

The game has been running since 2003 and resets every month or so. Have a look around the wiki for more information and history, or join our Discord. New players are always welcome to join the game at any time.

Thursday, May 01, 2025

Proposal: Bait and Switch

In the rule “Preparation Actions”, add a subrule named “Decoy” with the following text;

“Plant Decoy” is a virtual Preparation Action that any Guard can perform, and the following must be specified to perform it:
* The unique type and trait of an Artifact that exists in the publicly tracked list of Artifacts
* The letter of a Spot that is not an Ingress or a Station, is not Connected to an Ingress or a Station, and is not the Location of an Artifact

When Plant Decoy is resolved, the Location of the specified Artifact is privately tracked by the Concierge to be the Spot specified in that Plant Decoy action rather than the original Location of that Artifact, but the publicly tracked Home of that Artifact remains unchanged.

This is the counterplay for the “Back Door + Distractions” play by the Burglars. It’s prevented from being too powerful by the fact that you can only Decoy one Artifact per Guard that is able to perform a Preparation Action. The Burglers can still use “Back Door + Distractions”, but now they have to guess at which Artifact is not a Decoy.

I didn’t want to make this a “any Agent can perform” because then we get into multiple Agents planting a Decoy on the same Artifact and which one would take priority. Suggestions are welcome if we really want to enable Burglars to Plant Decoys as well.

posted by JonathanDark at 01 May 2025 17:05:00 UTC Comments (1)

Proposal: [Appendix] [Building Blocks] Anonymous Actions

In the Appendix rule “Representations of the Gamestate”, replace:

The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate, tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action

with

The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate. Unless the rule defining the action specifies otherwise, this occurrence is tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action

In the Building Blocks rule “Virtual Actions”, add the following text:

When the performance of a Virtual Action causes the modification of publicly tracked gamestate, the Concierge should publicly track the historical fact of the occurrence of that Virtual Action on behalf of the Agent who initiated that Virtual Action, using the Concierge’s own name in that public tracking, and privately track the historical fact of the occurrence of that Virtual Action using the name of the Agent who initiated that Virtual Action.

Similar to what qenya was suggesting in the comments on Rumor Mill, but allowing the Concierge to track the occurrence of the gamestate change publicly while only required to track the original initiator of the Virtual Action privately rather than publicly.

posted by JonathanDark at 01 May 2025 14:47:00 UTC Comments (2)