Doing a Cool Move in Nomic

11 Jun, 2026

I will be co-running Marathon Nomic, a 24-hour game of Nomic with Scribble M. Horror on the Gay Beholder OSR Discord server this weekend (the weekend of June 13-14). It is Scribble's brainchild, but I want to do my part to drum up a little hype for it.¹ Nomic is an extremely cool, mind-bending experience and it will make you better at thinking about games (no matter what niche ludological opinions you valiantly champion on your preferred social media platforms)!

With that said, Nomic is a bit opaque, especially when one is used to the conventions of tabletop role-playing games. It has no shared imaginative space, nor even a superficial theme. It is just a list of rules with provisions for their own modification. This can leave new players feeling unmoored -- it's cool that you can write new rules, but what's the point? Why propose arbitrary rule changes?

But in practice, Nomic is very approachable and extremely fun. The angle I'll take is that Nomic has Cool Moves.

The first thing to note is that Nomic has a victory condition. The goal of the game is to win, and victory is a well-defined outcome of the game. Thus, there is an element of strategy -- your "moves" are rule proposals. One way you can do a Cool Move in nomic by writing a clever proposal that is attractive enough to pass a vote while advantaging you in some way. This requires a lot of layered thinking and is hard to pull off. Some ways I've seen it done:

• Building an informal coalition to pass rules that advantage those in it
• Writing rules that are so creative and surprising people overlook their subtle implications
• Gradually assembling an advantageous situation though multiple innocuous rules

Another Cool Move is to exploit unanticipated consequences of the current ruleset. Rules are written by fallible humans and passed in sequence, under time pressure. Most games do not subject them to a rigorous audit. Accordingly, skillful Nomic players will be alert for opportunities to exploit the rules as written.² In RPGs we are usually discouraged from "power-gaming" and "rules-lawyering", but Nomic is a context in which those ways of relating to a ruleset are fully valid.

Finally, I've found that Nomic games create something akin to the missing "shared imaginative space" by evolving their own micro play culture. I'm going to call moves that shape this a type of "Cool Move". The first few rules passed in a game may indeed be arbitrary, but there's a butterfly and/or snowball effect where little quirks of the early rules shape later proposals. This operates at a mechanical level -- often a new mechanic or score will get plugged into later rules and sub-systems -- but also at a stylistic or thematic level. In Committee Nomic I, "magic beans" were added early on as a silly reward intended to be unrelated to score, but by the end of Committee Nomic II we had developed a whole agricultural subsystem. Basically, if the initial ruleset feels a bit stuffy and lifeless, it won't feel that way for long.

#game-design #musings #nomic