Calvinball - Television Tropes & Idioms

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.
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 below, a winning position one turn can become worthless next turn, or vice versa.
Steve Jackson Games' Knightmare Chess uses a deck of cards, from which each player draws with every move, to turn chess into calvinchess. Typical card effects including blowing up pieces and rotating the board ninety degrees.
Rithmomachy. Note that it still managed to be as popular as chess in 17th century Europe.

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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.
  - Actually Fluxx has blank card packs you can get to make up your own rules, goals, keepers, and actions if you so desire
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.
- End Point of Order.
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.
  - The Comp. Rules also contain the rule, "103.1. Whenever a card's text directly contradicts these rules, the card takes precedence. The card overrides only the rule that applies to that specific situation. The only exception is that a player can concede the game at any time (see rule 102.3a)." under the section "Magic Golden Rules". Which means that, the fact that any card can change the rules is at the core of the game. However, the number of cards that change the rules is very small, and most such cards can be gotten rid of in various ways, all of which undo their rules changes.
- 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 Calvinball-esque 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.
  - This thread on MTG Salvation discusses "combos" with Da Boss, involving made-up cards, mechanics, decks, and formats:
"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."
- 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 errata'd 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.
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.
- In a similar vein is the danish card/drinking game "Gud" ("God"). Each drawn card has such effects as "Texas Quick-Draw" (Last person to mime drawing six-shooters must drink) or "Lawyer" (Create or remove a rule). The real fun starts when a player draws a king, though. This will render him or her "God", and the player is thus allowed to alter, create or remove any rule at will. Needless to say, this can get very convoluted rather quickly. And since rule violations require penalties in the form of extra drinking...
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.)
The card game Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot increasingly gets this way with each expansion deck you add. Each card has a ridiculous amount of rules behind it, some only explained in the manuals, like a certain card not working on dates with all even numbers (like 02/18/08), or cards where you have to roll every dice X times, with X being the month. And then in the end, the winner is decided by what's essentially a complete random and arbitrary card that was shuffled and pre-chosen at the start of the game. Truly a game where the point is to have fun along the way.

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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.

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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 the original show clearly doesn't even use the same rules.
- 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 his opponent's...
Nesbitt: A five! That must be good!
Duke: Actually, that cuts your monster's power in half.
Nesbitt: What?!?' That doesn't make any sense! Are you making this up as you go along?!?
In chapter 6 of Scordatura, an Ah My Goddess fanfic by Davner, Urd is forced into an actual game of Calvinball against her sister Skuld in a sequence that parodies the Thunderdome sequence of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

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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).
Would the card game "I Win" in Big Daddy count in this?
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]
- What makes it even funnier is that Monaghan admitted they first came up with it "as a wind-up", to try and make Wood mad. Joke turned out to be on them — he enjoyed it!

Close Films

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.
- Cohn worked on comics and the game appeared in Legion Of Super Heroes as a Shout Out.
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 a combined send-up of American poker and the incredibly bizarre scoring variation of mah-jong, which gets much less amusing when the rules and hands are described in tedious detail.
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 almost Older Than Television.
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 glares angrily at Daemon)
Khardeen: You know twenty-seven variations?
(Daemon says nothing)
Jaenelle: Yes, he does, and that variation is brilliant. 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 Bridgeburners in the Malazan Book Of The Fallen, will occasionally play a game with the tarotlike 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.
- More than vaguely. It's heavily intimated, if not stated outright, that this is simply Fid's highly unorthodox method of reading the Deck.
In all honesty, Quidditch from the Harry Potter novels seem to have fairly straightforward rules, except when it comes to violations of those rules. It is mentioned that there are over 700 different fouls — and one of the novels cites a professional game where every single foul at that time (plus some that were not yet declared fouls at that time) occurred.
- One of the rules of Quidditch is that players are not allowed to learn about the fouls. It might "give them ideas". (Although what ideas they might get from being forbidden to carry a swarm of vampire bats in your pants is open to debate ...)
  - It's noted in Quidditch Through The Ages that the 'author' has had access to the complete foul list, and agrees that "No good could come of its release to the general public." He also notes that while the ban on wand use in-game would automatically restrict over half of them, and ones such as 'striking another player with an axe'... well...
In Tom Holt's Who's Afraid of Beowulf?, two imps have spent the past thousand years playing "Goblin's Teeth". They're still on their first game. Descriptions of the gameplay suggest it contains elements of chess, Monopoly, Scrabble and several others.
In John Knowles's A Separate Peace, Finny creates Blitzball which has rules understood by Finny and Finny alone.
In Welkin Weasels, the most popular game among mustelidae is called "hollyhockers". The game appears to be a bizarre mixture of poker and the I Ching, in which bets are placed on patterns that a thrown cupful of hollyhock seeds will fall into.
In The Accidental Tourist, the Leary family play a card game so complex that everyone else who has ever attempted to learn the rules, gives up in utter frustration.
Second Apocalypse has the game of Benjuka, in which the rules are changed by the moves players make.
The Myth series by Robert Asprin features Dragon Poker, which includes such rules as sitting in the chair at a certain point of the compass enables you to retroactively declare certain cards wild after the hand has been dealt. But only once per night, so the game won't completely get out of hand... :^)
"Hypodermic" in The Accidental Tourist is an invented card game with rules so arcane that only Macon and his siblings are able to play it.

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Fans of Star Trek The Original Series will no doubt recall Fizzbin.
- Which was actually made into an old Apple I Ie program.
- And, for that matter, 3D chess, which is understood to have rules, famous strategems, etc. In-universe that are never shown to the viewer. Used as a plot point in a couple of TOS episodes, then largely relegated to Shout Out status in the newer shows.
  - An episode of The Next Generation featured as a B-plot Data losing a game of some kind to the universe's greatest player of the game. The rules are never explained, but from the looks of things the point is to acquire territory on multiple 2D planes. Since the player in question is organic, Data is baffled as to how he could have been beaten by a theoretically slower brain. As the episode progresses, he has some kind of revelation, and, during a rematch, manages to maintain a stalemate long enough to confuse and infuriate his opponent, who furiously quits and claims something isn't kosher. Data explains that his opponent played to win and expected Data to do the same, which is why Data played just to block him. But they never explain the rules enough for Data's opponent to be anything but a poor sport when he walks away.
In The Monkees TV show, Mickey Dolenz invents the game of "Creebage" for much the same reason as Kirk invented Fizzbin: to distract a captor and allow for a quick escape.
The British show Green Wing gives us Guyball, which features all the quirks of jai alai, basketball, and Eton College's Wall Game. Plus a really funny hat.
- The one rule actually given was "curbing the Matterhorn", which entails insulting your opponent as much as possible.
The League Of Gentlemen has "Go, Johnny, Go, Go, Go, Go", a sketch in which a novice player makes increasingly trivial mistakes and violations of the rules to the titular game.
The Scrubs episode "My Jiggly Ball" had the titular jigglyball, which was actually a hoax designed by the Janitor to manuever J.D. into a position where the entire hospital got to throw tennis balls at him.
The Goodies had the game of "Spat", which seemed to be made of rules that led to Bill always losing and being injured.
Friends featured Cups, a card game invented by Chandler to transfer money to Joey. Beginners Luck is a vitally important feature.
- And later the quiz show Bamboozle! which involves "Wicked Wango Cards" and "The Wheel Of Mayhem"
- Also Phoebe Ball, which appears to consist of Phoebe asking questions and arbitrarily awarding points for the answer closest to the description she was thinking of. This being Phoebe, the others gets frustrated after one round.
  - No it doesn't have a name.
The British show That Mitchell and Webb Look (and its radio predecessor) features Numberwang, "the maths quiz that simply everyone is talking about." Unfortunately, it's portrayed as so ubiquitous its rules no longer need explaining — and the rules are not intuitive. Here are three sample games so that you can find a pattern.
- Series two offers the home version, which comes with the rulebook in twenty volumes; it also shows a 1930's episode where "the boffins" take several hours to work out whether the first move was Numberwang or not.
M*A*S*H had Double Cranko, played with a poker deck, a chess board, dice, and no rules whatsoever. When Colonel Potter finally turns the tables on Hawkeye in it, Hawkeye proceeds to invent Triple Cranko. (An earlier episode had Hawkeye and Trapper playing a similar venue, but as a Drinking Game.)
In Stargate Atlantis, Ronon introduces Sheppard to a "traditional Satedan sport" that is a sparring session where the rules change with every round. After picking himself off the floor a few times, Sheppard complains that Ronon is just inventing this as an excuse to kick his ass. He good-naturedly indulges Ronon though, possibly because he's used to it by now (his teammate Teyla regularly kicks his butt while attempting to teach him her fighting technique).
In the I Love Lucy episode "The Golf Game", Lucy and Ethel want to take up golf, and ask Fred and Ricky how to play. The men don't want their wives following them around the golf course, so they try to discourage them by inventing a set of crazy and overly complex instructions for play.
The Gillies Report had a running gag involving a reporter describing the results of the fictitious sport of farnarkling. He would describe the game using bizarre terminology but acting as if it was commonly understood. A typical example: "And he was soon arkling the grommet from all points of the gonad".
The Firefly episode "Bushwhacked" opens with a spirited game of Calvinball in the cargo bay.
Simon: They don't seem to be playing according to any civilized rules that I know.
Quizzlestick. Remember, always remember to use your Green Quizzle Chance.
In the French TV series Kaamelott, Perceval knows lots of totally unplayable games that he alone can understand and play. Some of them involve fourteen dice and artichokes.
- King Arthur seems to know perfectly the twisted rules of the "countersyrup" card game, as well:
  "We need 14 dice to play that game. Anyway, we can play it with cards, that's not a problem. What matter are the announcements."
The How I Met Your Mother episode "Atlantic City" features an unfathomable casino game called "Xing hai shi Bu Xing", which features cards, dominoes, changing seats with other contestants, a wheel of fortune, and a jellybean. Marshall is the only one who could figure out the rules just by watching the game while everybody else stands there befuddled and he's even able to give Barney game-winning advice. This is hardly a surprise, considering:
- "Bas-ice Ball," the hockey/basketball hybrid that Marshall's family plays. It's basically an excuse for his brothers to whale on each other.
- Also Marsh-Gammon, involving a Candy Land board, poker chips, playing cards, a buzzer, handwritten "Autobiography cards", a Twister spinner and some dice.
The Middle Man gave us Shabumi, an exceedingly complex card game played by high-class villainous types. Each player is given a full deck of cards, over 300 verbal and physical challenges are involved, and the price for loosing or cheating is death. Oh, and live bunnies are involved somehow.
Monty Pythons Flying Circus featured the quiz show "It's A Living", the rules of which were so insanely convoluted and complex (but somehow revolving around what fees the BBC got) that by the time the presenter finished explaining them, the show had finished.
In the 2004 Sci Fi channel reboot of Battlestar Galactica the pilots are often seen playing a card game known on the original show as "Pyramid", referred to on the Re Boot show as "Full Colors". The cards are six sided with a variety of symbols and colors to designate suit and rank; there are rules posted online but they are largely created from fan speculation. It is potentially impossible to integrate canon with an actual rule set, since the actors playing the pilots were known to improvise game terms and names of winning or losing hands on the spot.

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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. Still, apparently some actual teams were formed for a bit.
- An earlier example from Mad is the late fifties board game parody Gringo.
- Another was the board game "Three-Cornered Pitney" in 1983, with similarly ridiculous rules, as it was designed by one of the creators of 43-Man Squamish.

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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!
- This wasn't the first time this kind of match was used; this one is a popular, albeit seldom used kind of Zany Scheme for heels in Professional Wrestling.
  - And when the General Managers or Vince himself gets involved, their reason is automatically Screw The Rules I Make Them.

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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.
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.

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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 & 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.
Paranoia might fit the bill or subvert it depending of how you see it. Basically the rulebook (often ignored) states that arguing rules is against the Big Orwellian Omniscient AI's will, and it can (and will) result in painful death for the players. Actually, GMs make the rules as long as they keep the game interesting.

Close Tabletop 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.
- The card game in the previous game, Final Fantasy VIII, wasn't much better, with rules being added or removed more or less at random, depending on whom you play with.
- Directly parodied in Adventurers! with "Septuple Scare" (below).
Chuckles the jester in Ultima VII is a champion of "The Game", which it's impossible for him to explain the rules of without violating them. The objective is to complete a conversation with him without using any words containing more than one syllable.

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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!
A rare, "Playable" example of a Calvinballesque game.

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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. Shout-out!◊
Euchre is a game in Real Life, but in this strip of Loserz it's described in a way that it sounds like Calvinball.
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.
Ansem Retort used this nicely in one strip. Namine challenges Larxene to a card game where the rules are entirely made up, any card ever can be played, and there is apparently no real way to win. However...
Axel: How did you LOSE?! It was a card game YOU MADE UP!
Namine: She played a "Get out of Jail Free" card! How am I supposed to counter that?!
Septuple Scare from Adventurers! is portrayed this way. Ardam is currently the only one who has figured out the rules.
From Schlock Mercenary, we bring you Munchkin-clix of Cataan:
Schlock: Hah! Yahtzee! That's a critical hit!
Kevyn: But my cleric is on a triple word score. He gets an attack of opportunity.
Schlock: Can I burn a point of edge?
Kevyn: No. I think you have to mortgage one of your hotels.

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In the Whateley Universe, there's Dis-chess, which is something like 3-D chess where the rules change every few minutes.

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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.
- Compared to Wandaball, which uses a cinderblock.
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.
- And later on there was "Big Ball" (the actual name being ridiculously long). Apparently if one team were to actually win, the game would literally be trashed by Bowser (what's with all the Mario references?).
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....
- Played straight in another episode:
  Bart: You sunk my scrabbleship!
  Lisa: This game makes no sense.
Recess: School's Out includes something called "Battle Tag".
The F Games on Phineas And Ferb.
An episode of King Of The Hill had a B-plot revolving around Peggy's attempt to develop a mock game show based on all the things people like most about TV game shows. The result is an incomprehensible game called "Spin the Choice"; "On your turn, you can choose to spin, or you can choose to choose. If you choose to spin, you spin the Wheel of Choice..."

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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.
This troper has played a board game where the most important rule was to ignore the entire contents of the rule book.

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