Misère Game

Everyone loves playing games—almost as much as they love winning games. But sometimes trying to win isn't the point. Sometimes, in order to win it all, you have to lose it all. Enter the misère game, usually a variant of another game, where players win by satisfying what would otherwise be the lose condition.

Misère setup is popular in games that abide by combinatorial game theory. In the normal play convention, the last player to move wins, but in the misère play convention, the last player to move loses. This simple change makes combinatorial games easy to convert to this format, and some were even built for it. Players of video games can also implement it as a Self-Imposed Challenge.

Named after the misère bid in Trick Taking Card Games, which is done to avoid gaining any points. Compare Second Place Is for Winners, Deliberate Under-Performance, Do Well, But Not Perfect, Earn Your Bad Ending, Failure Is the Only Option, and Springtime for Hitler. Can overlap with New Rules as the Plot Demands if the misère ruleset is sprung on the players in the middle of the game, rather than specified at the outset.

Not to be confused with Fission Mailed, which is about fake-out Game Over screens.

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Real Examples:

Game Shows

• The 1987 version of Lingo used this as part of its Bonus Round. Normally, in normal gameplay, a team of two contestants are trying to reach a goal of completing a "Lingo", that is, guessing a 5-letter word, then drawing a number out of a hopper to mark off numbers on a card, some of which are already marked from the beginning of the round. Getting a Lingo, that is, like in Bingo, getting 5 numbers in-a-row on their card, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally from the corners, meant that the team won, and went to the Bonus Round. However, in the Bonus Round, the game is played the same, but the winning condition is not to get a Lingo. If the team got a Lingo in the Bonus Round, they lose and they do not win the prize money offered.

Literature

• One children's puzzle book posed this question: Two boys set out on a cycle race, having been told that the prize would be given to the rider whose bike passes the finish line second. How did they avoid slowing down and coming to a complete halt? Swap bikes, so that whoever got there fastest would do so on his rival's bike and his own bike would come second.

Tabletop Games

• In 22, whoever takes the last trick in a given hand is the loser, and adds the point value of the highest card to their score. Players are eliminated when their score reaches or exceeds 22, and the last player standing is the winner.
• 7 Blunders is a fan-made variant of the drafting game 7 Wonders where the goal is to end up with the fewest points instead of the most points. The only other major rule change is that you can't discard a card for money unless it's your only legal action. This serves to avoid making the game trivial, as discarding almost always gives you less value than building something.
• The Heretic in Blood on the Clocktower reverses the win and loss conditions for both sides. If you're on team good, better hope the demon doesn't find out there's a Heretic in play, because they'll almost certainly pick themselves to die, which normally is a loss for evil, but flips to a win for them.
• One of the most popular variants of chess is losing chess (AKA giveaway chess), which sees players try to lose all of their own pieces. Captures must be taken when available, and the king can be captured like any other piece. Unlike regular chess, losing chess has been weakly solved, with white being able to force a win with 1.e3.
• Feed The Kraken has a conventional victory for all players' teams by reaching the designated area. However, the cult leader has a one-time victory condition if they're thrown off the ship on one of the Feed the Kraken spaces.
• Gloom: You win the game by killing off your own characters, and the fewer happiness points they have when they died (points can go into the negative), the better your endgame score. The game ends when any player's last character dies.
• In Hearts, each heart card is worth one point, and the Queen of Spades is worth 13 points. Gameplay ends when someone scores 100 points, at which point the player with the lowest score is the winner. There is also "Shooting the Moon", where you attempt to win all 14 scoring cards; if you succeed, all of your opponents get the 26 points they're worth instead of you.
• Illuminati: A player is normally eliminated from the game if, at any time after their third turn, they control no group other than their Illuminati. But if the Servants of Cthulhu destroy their last group—and by doing so achieve their special victory condition of eight groups destroyed—they win.
• MAD Magazine got a licensed board game released in 1979. You start with $10,000 and, true to the parody nature of the comic, the goal of the game is to lose all your starting money.
• Magic: The Gathering: Normally, your deck running completely out of cards is a losing condition known as Milling Out; as soon as you try to draw from the empty deck, you lose. If this happens while you have Laboratory Maniac out, however, you instantly win instead. This has led to entire decks whose strategy is to burn down as fast as possible by deliberately savaging your deck with draws and normally-costly cards (and if you can trick the enemy into attacking it with effects all the better), then slapping down Laboratory Maniac when it's too late to stop.
• Nim, the most well-known impartial game, is commonly played as a misère game, where the player to take the last object loses instead of winning. The (solved) strategy for winning is exactly the same as in normal play, except when there's one object remaining in each pile. You would need to create an odd number of piles for the other player instead of an even number so that they would be forced to take the last object.
• Notakto is an impartial multi-board variant of Tic-Tac-Toe in which both players place X's and the goal is to force their opponent to create a row on the last remaining board. Being a misère game is necessary in this case since it would be trivially easy if it weren't.
• Papayoo is a meaner variation of Hearts: instead of having Hearts worth 1 point each, a fifth suit named Payoo is introduced and they each are worth their numerical value ranging from 1 to 20. There is also Papayoo - a randomly-selected 7 of one of the four regular suits is worth 40 points.
• Skat has the "null game", in which the declarer wins if they do not take any tricks.
• Werewolf (1997): The Jester (AKA the Tanner) is a third-party role that wins if they're eliminated during the day phase. Likewise, the Unjester wins if they're killed during the night phase. Both lose if they survive to the end.

Video Games

• Banjo-Tooie: In contrast to the Mayahem Temple kickball tournament where the player with the highest score wins, the Hailfire Peaks kickball tournament decides that the player with the lowest score wins, so the objective is to score points for the other players while keeping your own score low.
• Donkey Kong Barrel Blast: Candy's Challenge #26, "Let Wrinkly Kong Win!", requires the player to make sure Wrinkly Kong finishes in first place, against two enemy Kremlings—along with the player themselves.
• :the game: (2008) and its sequels, other than the minigames, consists of variations of jumping to the death in order to progress through the game. Reimagining :the game: subverts this (aside from the first level), because even if the characters start falling off-screen or are near an explosion, is equivalent to a Disney Death because they reappear later in-game (or an actual death against spikes or enemies rewinds back to the last checkpoint).
• Goose Goose Duck is a Social Deduction Game where getting voted out by the other players is usually a setback to your team winning. But if you're the Dodo, then you're a one-person team who instantly wins if you're voted out.
• Karoshi is a Puzzle Platformer where you're a suicidal salaryman, and the objective of each level is to kill yourself.
• Mario Party:
  • Mario Party 9: This happens during a "Reverse Mini-Game" in a Bowser Event. You play a standard mini-game, but the objective is to lose as quickly as possible instead of trying to play the normal way. The first person to lose the game will win. In the case of the minigame Chain Event, you have to "win" by being the last player to touch the bottom after going down through the chain, so in this case you have to drag yourself for as long as possible.
  • Island Tour: The main objective of the board Bowser's Peculiar Peak is to be the last player to reach the goal line, since the ones reaching first will be punished by Bowser.
• MARVEL SNAP: Normally you win a location by having the most total Power at it at the end of the game. However, you win The Bar With No Name by having the least Power there instead.
• Punch-Out!! for the Wii had a mode which gave you special challenges when fighting a boxer, such as keeping them from using a special move, or finding every unique way of earning a star punch. The easiest boxer, Glass Joe, had one challenge where the goal was to knock him down three times, but still lose the match... by decision! Doing so required you to minimize the points you'd normally earn through punching and blocking, but you still had to use enough punches to knock him down three times, and avoid KOing him.
• The Sam & Max: Freelance Police episode "Bright Side of the Moon" has a puzzle where the player needs to help the COPS develop the AI for their game Tic Tac Doom (a ripoff of tic-tac-toe). The problem is that Sam plays the game against Bluster Blaster who's a terrible tic-tac-toe player. The way to complete the puzzle is to intentionally lose the game against him.
• Smogon, the main hub for competitive Pokémon, has an Other Metagame called Loser's Game^note formerly Suicide Cup, where players try to lose the battle. Self-KO moves like Memento and Healing Wish are banned, so the main strategy is to rely on residual damage from the Black Sludge, Sticky Barb, Toxic Orb, and the move Steel Beam, which damages the user for 50% of their max HP. Alolan Sandshrew is notably banned for having the lowest Special Attack of any Pokémon that can learn Steel Beam, letting it KO itself in 2 turns while barely damaging the foe.
• Town of Salem: Each player in the game has a goal depending on their role, but none of them can achieve that goal if they get killed before that. The Jester role is the only exception to this in that their goal is to get killed in one specific way: getting voted off and lynched by the other players. If they achieve this, they get to kill one more player by haunting them to suicide with No Saving Throw. A goal so utterly contrary to everyone else tends to make the Jester a game-derailing Wild Card, as they try to play everyone else good and evil into killing them without giving themselves away.
• Who's Your Daddy? is a competitive multiplayer game where you play either as a suicidal baby or the baby's father. The baby wins if he can kill himself within the time limit, while the father wins if he can keep the baby alive until time runs out.

Web Videos

• Alpharad's videos "Mario Party, but you win by losing" and "Mario Party, but you lose by winning" see him and his friends race for last place in Mario Party Superstars. This is made harder by an added rule that players must take a Star whenever they're able to.
• Piotr Garschin Poland's "Lego Racers: Commander Cold the Champion!" is a Self-Imposed Challenge for LEGO Racers. Here, the goal of Circuit 5 is not to beat Baron von Barron and finish first place, but instead to help one of the NPC racers, Commander Cold, finish first place. Naturally, this requires the player to finish second place or lower.

In-Universe Examples:

Fan Works

• Ultra Fast Pony parodies this in the episode "Survivor: Equestria". Twilight and Spike are the first to find the victory treasure, but realize too late that the episode is actually a "reverse competition" where "whoever wins, actually loses". But in the Tribal Council immediately afterwards, Jeff Probst reveals this was actually a double-reverse competition, "another twist within a twist", so Twilight and Spike actually did win.

Live-Action TV

• Malcolm in the Middle: When Spangler finds out that Francis has been letting him win at pool, he is insulted and tells Francis to play for real and threatens to punish him if he loses (even if he loses fair and square). However, the other cadets know that Spangler is a Sore Loser who would take his frustration over losing out on them, so they threaten to do much worse to Francis if he wins. When Spangler realizes that Francis is throwing the game, he tries to spite him by throwing the game himself so that Francis will suffer the wrath of his classmates. At that point, the game becomes a competition to see who can lose fastest by sinking both the eight ball and the cue ball, a goal that requires just as much skill as actually winning.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "flashback", Strong Bad tells the story of how he met The Cheat: he and Homestar found a giant egg (which contained The Cheat, along with a lifetime supply of fish sticks), and argued over who would get to keep it. They resolve it with a competition: whoever can cross the greatest distance in ten steps is the winner. Homestar handily wins, but the Prince of Town then announces that the loser gets the egg (causing Homestar to let out a Big "WHAT?!").

Western Animation

• Cyberchase: In "Problem Solving in Shangri-La", the kids and the Hacker are challenged by Master Pi to play a strategy game for their freedom. Each player may take 1-3 green dragons from the bunch on their turn, and the player to take the last, red dragon loses. The kids figure out the strategy, but in the last round, Master Pi changes the rules so that the player taking the red dragon wins instead. They realize the only change to the strategy is to leave Hacker with the last 4 dragons (including the red one) instead of the last 5.
• Harley Quinn (2019): In "There's No Ivy In Team", Poison Ivy and Nightwing are trapped in a deadly escape room created by the Riddler with a spiked ceiling lowering on to them unless they can solve a chess riddle. When winning the chess game against the robot does nothing, Ivy deduces that they are actually supposed to let the robot beat them, which does stop the spikes.
• South Park: In the episode "The Losing Edge", the kids, sick of playing baseball all summer, try to intentionally lose in their little league tournament. Unfortunately, every team they play against ends up being even worse than they are. It takes a drunken brawl from Randy to finally get them disqualified.
• Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go: In the online short "Diesel's Rules", Diesel challenges Kana to a race and keeps making up frivolous rules as they go along, with the last being "whoever comes in second wins". Kana takes advantage of the fact that while she can stop on a dime, Diesel is heavier and harder to stop.

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