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.

Friday, August 01, 2025

Proposal: The Final Countdown

Replace the following text in the rule “Customers”:


There are at least as many Customers as Trucks.


With:


There are at least as many Customers as the number of Trucks, plus one.

Insert the following step into the Serve Atomic Action after “Queue Up” and before “Wash Up”:

* (From Tomorrow:) Last Call: Perform the Final Sale action

Add the following text to the rule The Night:

The Final Sale is an atomic action, with the following ordered steps:
1. Select the Dish that was purchased the most during the Queue up step in the Night action as the Dish of the Day. If there is a tie then choose one of these Dishes at random to be the Dish of the Day.
2. Perform a Sale for the Truck whose Menu contained the Dish of the Day by overriding the steps of the Sale for this Sale only:
  * The Active Customer reads the menu: The Yard selects the Dish of the Day to be the Active Customer’s Choice.
  * They look around: Nothing happens
  * They buy their meal: The Truck gains Dollars equal to the Price of the Active Customer’s Choice

Proposal: The Lamb is Kosher

Create a new rule “Cleavers”“

The verb to cleave means: to remove all square brackets and all text between them.
The verb to uncleave means: to remove all square brackets but not any text between them.

For example: “This is [not] good” becomes “This is good” when cleaved.

The above rule retroactively applies to the admin resolving this proposal.

In step “They eat their meal” of action “Sale” in rule “The Night”, replace this cleaved text with its uncleaved version:

contains the Ingredient “Oyster” [or “Lamb”], then the Yard

Add the following condition at the end of the same list:

If the Non-Oyster Dishes contained Lamb, the customer becomes a Regular and is not removed from the list of customers in the next step.

 

 

Proposal: No Man is an Island

Add a new rule called Espionage with the following text:

Once per Trading Day, a Truck may take a virtual Prep Action called Snooping. They must name the Truck that they are Snooping on.
When the Serve Phase begins, the Yard shall inform the Snooping Truck of the list of unique Ingredients that the Snooped Truck will be paying for during the “Prepare ingredients” step of this Trading Day’s Night action

Replace the contents of the rule “Happy Hour” with the following text:

Once per Trading Day, a Truck may declare a Happy Hour as either a Prep Action or a Serve Action by making a blog post titled “Happy Hour $X”, where X is an integer greater than 0.
This sets their Happy Hour Discount to X and immediately reduces the Price for each Dish on their Menu by X.
After that Night is completed, the Truck’s Happy Hour Discount becomes 0.

Add a new rule called “Supply Chain Disruption” with the following text:

There is a publicly tracked variable called Unavailable Ingredients which is the list of Ingredients that are unavailable for the current Trading Day. Unavailable Ingredients is empty by default. 
At the beginning of each Trading Day, the Yard shall perform the following atomic action:
1. Clear the Unavailable Ingredients list.
2. Randomly select three Ingredients and add them to the Unavailable Ingredients list.

Append the following text to the rule “Dishes”:

A Truck’s Menu may not contain any Dish that includes an Unavailable Ingredient.

Add the following text to the end of the sentence in the rule “Signatures” that starts with “If so marked”:

if the dish does not contain an Unavailable ingredient.

 

I fully expect that this Proposal will be unpopular because of the number of changes here. But I wanted to start a conversation on the current state of the game. With 10 ingredients the number of dish combinations is pretty high. The possibility of undercutting someone else’s price is very low and so the current meta is very low in competition. Adding a cost to the ingredients potentially improves this by making Trucks focus on different profit margin strategies. But I still think that the potential for competition is too low to be interesting at this point. Its too easy to go for a single high-priced unique Dish and avoid competition altogether. At that point we’re all living on separate islands. Idk, maybe I’m alone in this thinking but I’d like to see some changes that make the current game more competitive and/or have more pull on Customers.


This proposal introduces a little bit of competition by limiting Dish combinations and providing more strategic options for undercutting the competition without being overpowered in my opinion.

Any More Prep Needed?

We’ve got 8/14 truck menus set at the time of this post. There’s a few pending Proposals that will slightly tweak things. Is anyone waiting for anything else to settle out before setting a Menu? Just curious if folks are simply waiting for these last tweaks to go in, or if the remaining players just tuned out due to the scam and ensuing proposal delays.