Drawbitrary

Rules

Setup and Objective

Necessary materials for the game:

• A colored marker, pencil, or pen, and small scrap of paper for each player
• A main piece of paper with a 4×4 square grid on it.

Before play begins, the players decide on a theme, and then each player decides on two scoring rules, each within the context of the theme, one to be maximized and one to be minimized. Rules are kept secret. In games with more than 2 players, each player then passes their rules to their left, revealing their rule to exactly one other player.

The rules must be of the form "5 points per _" (the max rule) and "−2 points per _" (the min rule). Rules refer to drawings in the grid.

Playing the game

On your turn, you may either draw or write in a cell that has to do with the theme, or draw an edge of a cell. The drawings should take less than a minute. A cell that already has a drawing can't be drawn in again. You may announce what it is you've drawn.

After each drawing, the player rates your drawing as to how well it matches that player's rules. A rating is a number between −3 (very bad) and +3 (very good) with 0 (neutral) in the middle. Write this rating in the top-left corner of the cell that was drawn in, or directly on top of the edge that was drawn.

It is explicitly allowed to draw a cell as empty. This counts as a drawing and cannot be overridden.

Scoring

The players win if all players' max rules were scored at least once by someone other than themself.

Example

A possible theme is farming. Let's say one player chooses the rules 5 points per animal next to farmhouse; −2 points per pair of 2 adjacent animals. These rules fit the theme, and they create interesting interactions with what another player draws; their rules might be more about fields and grains. It's useful to decide a theme where the categories are implied, or decide on the categories explicitly—if the theme were "words," it would be ambiguous whether the cells should have letters, that form words in larger structures, or whether the cells should have words, that form sentences in larger structures. I recommend avoiding this by specifying the category size before the game starts.

In addition, either come up with a standard definition for words like "adjacent" (including diagonals or not) or require that it be defined each time.

Advice on themes

A theme that is more complicated (and also more interesting) is something like chess, where there are many predefined interactions—check, defendedness, legal move, and so on. It also has a more limited set of symbols to draw, which can be advantage. Imagine a theme like real numbers. The set is uncountably infinite, and so there's an infinite number of possible rules, and having rules that govern entirely different things defeats the purpose of having a theme.

Themes should have a set of symbols that are relatively easy to draw.