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Hobbes: "Okay, the score is oogy to boogy." Calvin: "I already had oogy!"
Describe Calvinball here.
If only it were that easy...
See, this is for any game which the protagonists play, but which we don't learn the full rules for. And often, what rules we do learn are insanely convoluted, can change at a moment's notice, and/or have bizarre exceptions and by-laws. Usually, this is for one of three good reasons:
- The games rules change whenever the players want, the players know this and aren't playing to win just to have fun.
- The protagonists are playing a non-existent game, making up the rules as they go in an attempt to hide an ulterior motive.
- Really, any attempt to explain the full rules would just take away from the joke, so why bother?
You know you're dealing with a Calvinball-style game when the game's name is introduced, followed by a cut to another scene, then a cut back to a disaster area. Those are always the best.
Compare Noodle Incident, Take Our Word For It.
Also see Pac Man Fever, where writers create Calvinball out of video games (intentionally or not) — all we know is that most involve levels where you kill everyone with lots and lots of button mashing and joystick swinging — far more than what a game should have.
Examples:
Comicbooks
- The name, of course, comes from the anti-game invented by Calvin And Hobbes, whose only consistent rule was that you couldn't play the game the same way twice.
- Well, that and "No one can question the masks".
- Bill Waterson explained that playing Calvinball was simple: Make up the rules as you go.
- In fact, Calvinball can be played as a coherent metagame; the secret to winning is to quickly and creatively alter the rules to your benefit while not violating the one true rule- that no other rule may be made twice! (And not questioning the masks.)
- Something his babysitter caught on to fairly quickly.
- Calvin and Hobbes also tend to turn nearly any other game they play into Calvinball. Just watch them play one-on-one baseball with over 23 bases and entire ghost teams.
Literature
- The trope's first reported instance was in MAD Magazine back in the 60s, when they invented a college game called 43-man Squamish. Details are sketchy, but when official gear includes a shepherd's crook and flippers, odds are the game wasn't meant to be played anyway.
- An earlier example from Mad is the late fifties board game parody Gringo
 .
- Fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are well aware of Brockian Ultra-Cricket, which primarily involves smacking people with random sports equipment, then apologizing from a distance. The only known attempt to collect all the rules resulted in a volume so massive it produced a black hole. There have been fewer games of Ultra-Cricket than wars fought over rule differences in Ultra-Cricket.
- Which is actually a good thing since Brockian Ultra-Cricket is actually more devastating than the wars fought over the rules.
- Gary Cohn's "Rules of Moopsball", as the name suggests, describes the increasingly bizarre rules of a most unusual sport. The Tabletop Games setting GURPS Illuminati University makes Moopsball the most popular sport on campus.
- Attempts have been made to codify and play Cripple Mr. Onion, the most famous card game on the Discworld, but it really is funnier left to the reader's imagination.
- Robert Asprin's Myth series includes the analogous Dragon Poker, which gets much less amusing when the rules and hands are described in tedious detail, especially as it's a variation on American poker, one of far too many examples of Americanitis in the series.
- Actually, while the basic rules for Dragon Poker are essentially 6-card poker, the "conditional modifiers" (the weirdness that changes the rules depending on a host of other things) are most likely a send-up of Mahjong. (Anyone who can play Rummy can play Mahjong, but learning the scoring can give you a nervous breakdown).
- And just as an added bonus, the main character didn't actually know the rules of the game. He just ended up pretty good at it through blind luck (which, more or less, describes his whole life up to that point).
- It wasn't luck; he sat in on a game and (unbeknowst to him) the dealer cheated in his favor, as part of a larger plot.
- The Leary family in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist invented a card game called "Vaccination", which after decades of refinements has become so convoluted that no outsider could possibly learn how to play it. Except for Julian, who marries into the family; when he learns the rules, lead character Macon Leary is so impressed he withdraws his objection to Julian marrying his sister.
- The Herman Hesse novel The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi in early translations, Das Glasperlenspiel in its original German) revolves around an extraordinarily complex game whose rules are never explained - and its publication in 1943 makes this trope Older Than Television.
- Sabaac from Star Wars is like this. Not only are the "standard" rules convoluted and mostly fanon, but there are an ungodly number of variant rules. This troper recalls one game where the deck had been supplemented with numbered cards that included fractions, cubic roots, and complex numbers. Another variant, called Random Sabaac, would use a computer (in the scene example, C-3PO) to change the rules to a randomized choice of all possible rules (presumably with only the standard deck) after an equally random length of time. More than once in the game he announced a new rule change before he finished announcing the last one. And the players were drunk.
- That last part, while adding to the difficulty, is the only way I'd play that mess.
- Similarly the game Dejarik, a chess-like game first shown in Episode IV: A New Hope, has never gotten a full set of rules and is clearly more complicated than its real-life counterpart, but the players have never been shown to be surprised by a rule as opposed to a strategy. Just always remember to let the Wookiee win.
- Shent from Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is implied to be like this. Its complexity is increased by the fact that players aren't expected to play to win, but rather to create aesthetically pleasing situations.
- Azad in The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks is a non-comedic example of an absurdly complex game. It involves at least three large boards and several smaller boards as well as multiple side games involving cards. The winner of an Azad tournament becomes the next Emperor.
- In the Black Jewels Trilogy, by Anne Bishop, Jaenelle and her coven invent a game played with cards and a board that has twenty-six variations, which the players may switch between in the middle of the game. Their respective husbands and consorts suspect that they purposely made it up to frustrate the male mind, until Daemon, Jaenelle's consort, invents a twenty-seventh variation that allows him to beat Jaenelle. Their conversation about it the next morning turns into Innocent Innuendo. (If anyone has the book handy, please copy it down here.)
- *grabs book* The game's name is 'cradle.' It consists of a game board, colored stones, bone discs, a deck of cards, and sadistic ingenuity. The dialogue goes something like this:
Lucivar: "You look like you put in a long night yourself."
Daemon: "It was interesting."
Jaenelle: "There's something a bit sneaky about the positions in variation twenty-seven that give a male so much of an advantage, but I haven't worked it out...yet."
Philip (maybe more) glares angrily at Daemon.
Khardeen: "You know twenty-seven variations?"
Daemon: says nothing.
Jaenelle: "Yes, he does, and that variation is brillian. Sneaky, but brilliant."
Khardeen and Aaron haul him out of the room.
Khardeen: "We'll get breakfast later. First, we need to have a little talk."
Daemon: "It's not what you think. It's really nothing."
Aaron: "Nothing!?"
Khardeen: "If you've figured out a new variation of 'cradle' that gives a man the advantage, it's your duty as a Brother of the First Circle to share it with the rest of us before the coven figures out how to beat it."
Daemon is not sure he had heard them correctly.
Aaron: "Well, what did you think Consorts do at night?"
Daemon bursts out laughing.
- Fiddler and the Birdgburners in the Malazan Book Of The Fallen, will occasionally play a game with the deck of dragons that is something like poker, except they make up the rules as they go along. Because they are playing with a deck of cards used to represent their world's pantheon, the games end up being vaguely prophetic.
- In the Whateley Universe, there's Dis-chess, which is something like 3-D chess where the rules change every few minutes.
Film
- From the Fun With Acronyms Department comes TEGWAR, or The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. First seen in the movie Bang the Drum Slowly, it is a game invented by professional baseball players for the sole purpose of winning money off of gullible fans (who, for the most part, are just happy to play a card game with pro baseball players).
Radio
- A lot of beginners playing Mornington Crescent, from the British radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, mistake it for a game of Calvinball due to its arcane stratagems, ancient rules with myriad variants, and famously arbitrary victory condition ("first to say 'Mornington Crescent' wins"), leading many untrained observers to call the game nothing more than "stations in the London Underground being shouted out randomly". They're right.
- This is especially jarring to those players who go so far as to set up an enormous double lengthwise switch halfway through the game, only for it to be called nothing more than a lot of bull. Philistines.
- But... the Bull stratagem is only applicable under Arkwright's Conventions, which have been outlawed in competition play since 1986.
- And yet without it, everybody ends up in a Dollis Hill loop. Some have suggested the rule amendments made in 1986 were made to encourage looping, but those have clearly never found themselves at an inverted Marylebone Station.
- Mornington Crescent was also a Perplex City card.
- Stephen Fry's Saturday Night Fry gave us the game of "Kick The Frog", in which Hugh Laurie was the frog and had to answer questions. If he got the answers wrong, Jim Broadbent kicked him. If he got the answers right, Phyllida Law kicked him. There was no mechanism to make someone else the frog.
- From the back of the box: "Kick The Frog is like life. It isn't fair." The rules were subsequently changed to become (in principle) fairer, first by becoming a democracy (in which only Stephen and Jim had the vote, and both voted Hugh should remain the frog, and neither he nor Phyllida should get a vote) and eventually into a pluralist social democracy (in which, after long discussion, almost everyone agrees it makes sense for Hugh to remain the frog). Eventually Hugh persuades them to stop playing altogether. So they just kick him instead.
Live Action TV
Professional Wrestling
- At WWE Backlash in 2001, William Regal challenged Chris Jericho to a Duchess of Queensbury rules match, which Jericho readily accepted, despite having no idea what "Duchess of Queensbury rules" entailed. It turned out that Duchess of Queensbury rules simply meant that Regal got to change the rules whenever Jericho was about to win. Jericho attempts to pin Regal? Oops, the match is divided into two rounds, and round one just ended. Jericho gets a submission? Oops, submissions aren't allowed!
Webcomics
- Ozy And Millie occasionally partake in House Rules Parcheesi. We never see much of the game itself, but we do see its aftermath: the room tends to look like a tornado hit it.
- Euchre is a game in Real Life, but in this Loserz strip it's described in a way that it sounds like Calvinball.
- This troper is from Michigan, where the game is very popular, and despite having sat through a few games and attempting to play it, he still doesn't get it.
- In Dork Tower, Igor insists on inventing '"house rules" for almost every game played, including rules for landmines in Candyland and a variation of Licence Plate Bingo that was so arcane the road trip was over by the time he'd finished explaining.
- Mac Hall has Australian Indoor-Rules Quiddich. The entire point of the game is to smack a ball with an LED light at people while playing in a blacked-out hallway. No score, no other rules. Just carnage.
- Boxer Hockey centers around a team of a sport, after which the strip is named. The basic rules are that players wear nothing but boxer shorts (not briefs, not thongs, not longjohns, boxer shorts), and they carry around any long, thin-ish implement which can be used for hitting things. This is because the object of the game is to get the ball, which is actually a gene-spliced frog that's had it's DNA cut with rubber, into the opponent's goal. Other than that, it's up to the players as to the strategies they use and nothing's forbidden. Beating your opponent into pulp is an entirely valid strategy, although I'm given to understand actually killing them is frowned upon.
Web Animation
- Most of the sports featured in Homestar Runner, which probably became a running joke after having its ridiculousness pointed out by Strong Bad in the commentary for "In Search of the Yello Dello":
Strong Bad: What the crap kind of freaked-up sport are you guys playing anyways? I mean, you're on a football field, but you've got a basketball goal, and basketballs and footballs...
Homestar Runner: I know! It's America's pastime!
- Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series often portrays the titular "children's card game" this way, mostly as a way of making fun of how complicated the game actually is, and how what the original show clearly doesn't even use the same rules.
- It should be noted that the original manga and anime for Yu-Gi-Oh were both made BEFORE Duel Monsters became a real-life card game, so some inconsistencies with the actual game should be expected. Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series is either unaware of this fact, or chooses to ignore it for the sake of humor (which would not surprise this troper in the least).
- Episode 107 of the actual show plays with this as well. After a duel shifts to a dice game, it is declared that the roll of a die will alter each monster's strength. The protagonist declares that his roll doubles his power, while the antagonist's roll cripples his own. The antagonist's response? "Are you making up these regulations as you go?"
Western Animation
- Futurama has Blernsball, which is like baseball, but with so many new rules and gimmicks added — including the ball being attached to a bungee cord, a "multi-ball" mode, and a giant spider that runs the bases — that hardly anyone can tell what's going on. It's quite obviously a spectator sport, because it at least looks really cool. Not to mention we see it twice... and it changes near-completely between viewings.
- On Garfield And Friends, a U.S. Acres short involved Orson convincing the others to play a game of "pigball". We don't see how actual pigball is played, as Roy plays a joke by switching the actual rules with a set of increasingly absurd ones (like flipping a baked potato not only to see who plays first, but if the game is actually played at all) which instruct the players to score points by doing embarrassing and ridiculous stunts (like dressing in silly outfits or finding a live hippopotamus).
- At the start of the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost", Spongebob and Patrick are playing a game that involves bubble-blowing, moving pieces on a chess board with your breath, carrying rocks around, climbing a tree, and other crazyness. At one point, Patrick triumphantly shouts "I lose!", until Spongebob reminds him "But it's not Tuesday, Patrick." When an annoyed Squidward asks them what they're doing, they sheepishly admit "We don't know."
- 'Tuesday' being, of course, a reference to one of the few known rules of Fizzbin.
- There's an episode of Fairly Oddparents in which Timmy and friends play "Timmyball." Same principle.
- The Ed Edd N Eddy episode "Urban Ed" opens with the Eds getting Johnny to play a game consisting of seemingly random stunts (like shooting peas through a straw to pop balloons, or throwing marshmallows into a tuba bell). When the last step turns out to be "put a quarter in the jar", Johnny sees through their Bavarian Fire Drill and walks off, saying "Nice try, Eddy."
- Chowder has "Sniffleball", which is basically baseball played with giant gloves on one's head, a ball of slow-moving green snot, and twelve bases that are located underwater, in the sky, and in Bowser's castle. Really.
- An episode of Rugrats: All Grown Up! has all of the kids in the playground playing the card game Yu-Gotta-Go (bear with me here). Unfortunately, it is hardly clear how the game is actually played. It seemes to be a glorified version of snap, also the winner appears takes all the losers cards. Huh.
- Subverted on an episode of (where else?) The Simpsons, where Homer, Lenny, and Carl are playing a chair-hockey game. They disagree on not only the rules, but what game they're playing (Homer claims it's called "Cincinnati Time-Waste"). At first, it would seem that this would fall into Calvinball territory, but then Carl opens up an official Cincinnati Time-Waste rulebook...
Video Games
- Many of the Zoq-Fot-Pik from Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters are obsessed with Frungy, the "sport of kings". Naturally, the player is never given an opportunity to learn the rules of Frungy.
- Word Of God tells us that however it's played, it's played with gusto!
- The Zork series featured Double Fanucci, a card game with 15 suits and absurdly complex rules (which are never given in full).
- In Final Fantasy IX, Tetra Master is basically Calvinball to the people who play it. Nobody who you meet actually know the rules, and as a player you have to pick the rules up from other character's suppositions and actual gameplay. Apparently the cards sort of play themselves somehow.
Real Life
- this trooper creates calvinball games at his camp. and it is awesome.
- There's a whole class of games where the rules can be changed, such as Nomic, Bartok, and Dvorak. Depending on the group playing the game, the complication and absurdity of the rules can reach Calvinball-esque levels quickly.
- The rules of the card game Fluxx start simply, but constantly shift in unexpected ways with each new card, such that the players aren't even sure what will make a winning hand next turn. It's been described as "Calvinball with a deck" - unjustly because you can't "make up whatever you like", you can only "do what the cards say", making it more like a simplified Magic The Gathering than like Calvinball.
- The difference being that there's only fifty or so cards in the game, and the shtick becomes predictable and boring once you know what kind of cards are in the deck (nearly all of which are either "draw X cards" or "collect items P and Q"). It doesn't help that several expansions to Fluxx exist (Family Fluxx, Eco Fluxx, Stoner Fluxx...) that are nearly exactly the same thing only with different names on the cards.
- The card game 1000 Blank White Cards has far fewer rules than Fluxx. The game ends when someone cannot play or draw a card, and the person with the highest score wins. Other than that, players can mess with the score, the rules, and really just do whatever the heck they want by creating a card with that effect. This is Nomic with cards.
- As, indeed, is the aforementioned Dvorak. Which is superior seems to depend on if you prefer your Nomics with democracy or without.
- Point of Order: The most important rule of the card game "Mao" is that you can't tell anyone else the rules. The point of the game is to guess them. New players are introduced to the game with the phrase, "The only rule I can tell you is this one." You are even penalized for every infraction of the rules.
- "Crates" (Chicago Cutthroat Crazy Eights) has a similar rule against telling the rules.
- And let's not forget Mornington Crescent.
- This troper learned a variant wherein the veteran players were allowed to tell the neophytes one more rule: Namely, the winner of a given round gets to make up a rule for the next one. You then have to work out not only the base set of rules, but the new rule, and also if it's still going to apply in subsequent rounds. Good luck, Razputin.
- End Point of Order.
- In the audio commentary for The Lord Of The Rings, Dominic Monaghan describes "Tig", a game with ever-changing rules that the other Hobbits made up as a prank on Elijah Wood. "So we — the three of us [Billy Boyd, Monaghan, and Sean Astin] — were constantly getting it right. And every time Elijah tried a new way of tigging, we'd say, 'No, Elijah, you can't tig on a tog, you can't tag on a tig, you have to do an elephant impression if you're gonna tig Billy." (He adds that the prank went on for a year before the three 'fessed up.) [December 14, 2003]
- The game Magic The Gathering constantly changes because of the release of new card sets with corresponding rules updates. It can feel an awful lot like Calvinball at times, but that's part of its charm.
- For that matter, the main rule of the game may as well be that players may do nothing but follow their turn order, play one land per turn, and attack once per turn unless a card says otherwise.
- For players who want to make it more like Calvinball, a variant called Chaos Magic exists, which means that every turn, a random effect is selected from a long, long table with entries ranging from the trivial to the board-sweeping.
- Or Mental Magic, in which you can play a card in your hand as any card with the same mana cost except itself (No repeats), and typically there's one shared deck. Absurdity ensues. With style.
- Then you've obviously never looked at the comprehensive rules, a massive document that outlines how any possible interaction of cards will play out. Impressive for the thousands of cards and billions of possible combinations possible.
- This is the whole point of the Future Sight timeshifted card Steamflogger Boss, which has the ability, "If a Rigger you control would assemble a Contraption, it assembles two Contraptions instead." Both Assemble and Contraption currently have no meaning in Magic, and Rigger only has a meaning because that's Da Boss's creature type. This article explains that the card was designed as a joke, and lists other possibilities for the card's ability that were suggested during development. Some are even more Calvinballesque than the ability it was actually printed with, such as "Other Splorgs you control may attack and block as if the 'five-second rule' didn't apply to them," "If another Splorg you control would molt, it molts tomorrow instead," and "Whenever another Splorg you control becomes self-aware, you may toggle any or all of its statuses." All of these terms are currently meaningless.
"You're all forgetting Chicken and Eggs is still T3 legal. Steamflogger Boss/Mortal Coils looks competitive, but in practice it'll be Flipped out of existance, and your opponent will still be able to resonate to 50 by turn four, no matter how many contraptions you assemble. The fact remains that without a proper answer to Planar Hatchery, contraptions aren't tournament viable no matter how much support they get."
- Three Words: Wall of Boom.
- At one time, the card Time Vault's ability required that there be a short amount of time between players' turns when abilities could trigger and mana sources could be played. Wall of Roots has a mana ability that can only be played once each turn, but the creator of the deck argued that between turns it could be played any number of times. The deck used Sands of time to skip the untap phase (to avoid mana burn) and go straight to the upkeep, when normal abilities could be played. The mana was then used to put an infinite number of counters on Magma Mine and deal an infinite amount of damage to the opponent. The combo was legal for only a couple days after it was discovered, then Wizards of the Coast errataed Time Vault so that there was no time between players' turns. Note that, although the combo relied on the wording of Time Vault, Time Vault was not even in the deck. I Am Not Making This Up.
- This troper heard it wasn't legal period, as such Rules Lawyering tends to get vetoed by the tournament judge.
- Webzine Critical Miss gave us Clique: the unplayable, uncollectable card game. The goal is to confuse as many spectators as possible.
- In the card game/drinking game alternately known as "Asshole" and "President", one of the things the president can do is add a new rule at the start of a round (for instance, "pass all of the twos to me"). Whether or not these rules stay in effect for the whole game is up to the traditions of the players. As well, seats are constantly changed depending on who won the previous round, and drinking elements are often incorporated into it.
- Another game, Numbers, has each card using a different rule (for example Four has all girls drink and Six has all guys drink). The King lets whoever drew it add a new rule that has to be followed or else the breaker has to drink again. One of the favorites was that you can't say the word "Drink".
- This game is also known as Kings, and has its own entry on The Other Wiki. (type it in, the linking can't handle parentheses)
- In the game Democrazy, the object is to reshape (by player vote) the rules for acquiring and scoring colored chips so that your stash of chips is worth the most points at the end. As in the Fluxx example above, a winning position one turn can become worthless next turn, or vice versa.
- So, you know Rock-Paper-Scissors? That game, with three gestures? Well, people made five-gesture versions that added "Lizard" and "Spock" (but disagreed on which beats which). Then someone made a version with seven gestures. Then nine. Then eleven. Then fifteen. Then twenty five. Then ''A Hundred And One''. By the time there are 5,050 possible outcomes, it probably qualifies as Calvinball.
- But to really be Calvinball, it'd have to be this.
- Rithmomachy. Note that it still managed to be as popular as chess in 17th century Europe.
- An inside joke that was started with this troper and his friends was German Rugby. We were watching the college's rugby game and started cracking jokes about how in German Rugby, the ball is a concrete block, the players throw weapons to each other, and the shoes have actual spikes on them. The rest of the rules we make up as we go along, presenting them as regional varieties such as Bavarian Rules, Berlin Rules, Saxon Rules, etc. The confusion people express between the absurdity and inconsistency of it all is priceless.
- This troper and her best friend got bored one day and invented "Glallyboard," a board game involving several old checkerboards, plastic figures dug up from the closet, glass beads, and Legoes. Like all good Calvinball games, you make up the rules as you go. It's great fun.
- Likewise, this one and his camp friends used to play a free-form sort of game with legos that vaguely resembled a mash-up of every RTS in existence. It was... complicated. There was also a K'nex version, which was even more absurdly complicated.
- Steve Jackson Games' Knightmare Chess.
- The above Australian Rules Indoor Quidditch reminds this (Australian) troper of Soccerub, a game invented more or less to unwind between standardised tests. There is a ball. You have to get it. By any means possible. Hilarity Ensues. Sometimes played in teams.
- This troper and his friends made a game called Bluff My Bluff, a card game which has gradually built up to the point when newcomers have no clue what is happening. It includes cards like "Flaming Wedding Cake", "Stephen's Fork Impression", and "Green Stuff and a Hose". Only a few days ago, we edited the rules once again, this time to discourage the rampant Alliancing that was spoiling the whole game.
Tabletop Games
- According to Role-playing game designer Ron Edwards, "Calvinballing" is when a player in a tabletop role-playing game utilizes mean-spirited misinterpretations of the rules to one-up the other players and gain control of the game.
- In one of the Dungeons And Dragons settings, Kholiast is an elven game played with "a deck of more than 1000 cards, a variable hand determined by a throw of dice, and a point-counting system that would drive even the most dedicated Candlekeep scholar completely mad."
- Described in Monster Manual V is the Great Game of the dragons, Xorvintaal. The basic rule is "Steal the other dragons' treasure", but most of the gameplay is left up to the DM's invention, as in "you want the PCs to do this, call it a Xorvintaal maneuver".
- Talislanta has "Trivarian," which is so complex that it can only be played by people with two brains.
- Pyramid Magazine featured a campaign setting called LudiCROUS — The Sport of the Future!, about a sport where the rules could change from moment to moment... including the rules about how the rules could change. A good LudiCROUS team needs people with a wide variety of skills, from footballers to chessmasters, because the goal of the game could be almost anything.
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