This afternoon your author had the great privilege to partake in the latest round of a game called A Hundred Blank White Cards. More a conversation than a game, this incarnation of BWC is a free-form affair where members of the party all create their own cards before the play starts—each one consisting of image, text, and code, as it were—and shuffle them into a face-down deck. Everyone starts with a half dozen cards, and generally on your turn you play one (announcing its effect, if any), and draw another, play proceeding clockwise. What happens after that is a matter of imagination and cosmic rays. Although some things are explicitly legal, nothing is illegal: playing out of turn, for example, is without trauma as long as the player stays true to the greater virtues of BWC. Which seem to be wit, beauty, charm, and of course mockery of persons not present.

The result was righteously unexpected, with such curiosities occuring as a "Mandelbrot pet" (I still say it was more Julia than Mandelbrot) and a "specification of brillo pads" (which asserted such properties as "pliable" and denied "noisome," "scabrous," and "sere"). Lovely! Thank you, sages of this art.

Now, this rather rule-sparse game immediately suggests a number of ruled versions, which I think might actually be more fun to play. For example, when the score is not kept, there's not much incentive to actually notice what's been played, lending the game a sort of "witty but solipsistic" quality. Keeping track of score would both encourage people to pay attention (heightening everyone's experience), and also offer incentives for such appealing complexities as, let's say, selfishness, alliances, quick inversions (a la Othello), and who knows what else. Disallowing absolute targets, like "Ezekiel loses one hundred points," would keep the game playable rather than saucy. To make it more interesting, perhaps all point values should also be relative to some other element within the game—e.g., the value of the previous move, or the first one, or the next one, or the time of day, etc.

Provocative question #4572: is there any way to rig the initial rules so that the cards we draw can meaningfully create new "things"? Such as teams, priority numbers, or independent point counts (as energy, mood, karma), etc. The challenge here, of course, is in finding some way to encourage different players' creations to interact, rather than be wittily solipsistic. If I make a card that puts its player in a category—say, "chordate"—and another card that makes its player "exoskeletal," is it possible that cards created by others could, let's say, double all point values held by chordates and deduct one point from every exoskeletal player?

The ultimate question is how to encourage a playable structure without stifling the wide-open creativity that the game currently allows. But, hey, we live in this incredible cosmos, don't we? Where did it come from?

"After all, the great sea flashes and yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn."
—Berryman