September 25, 2006

5-card Nancy

The game is essentially an exercise in collaborative storytelling, played with a deck of cards. Each card in the deck features a single, unique panel taken from Ernie Bushmiller's newspaper comic-strip "Nancy." An initial card is selected randomly from the draw pile and placed face up on the table to serve as the first panel in the collaborative strip that will emerge through gameplay. A player will then select a single card from her hand, and place that card face up and to the right of the emerging comic strip. The other players then vote on the appropriateness of that particular panel to the unfolding narrative. If majority opinion favors the proposed panel, it becomes a part of the strip, otherwise it returns to the hand of the player who proposed it: boardgamegeek. Play 5-card Nancy Solitaire! Wikipedia on Nancy. Nancy herself.

posted by the quidnunc kid 17 years ago
  • fried green committee cut-ups in guise of a game oulipo for those who dislike starting their cold wits from shallow scratch
  • Whoa! That's some fancy Nancy.
  • Well, it's no Aldomania, but it has its charms. The really pity is that it's hard to find old skool nancy that one is willing to slice up.
  • "Why Nancy? Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip "Nancy" is a landmark achievement: A Comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the "gag-strip"; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile. Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car. Much has been made of the "three rocks." Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie's way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn't be "some rocks." Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate "some rocks" BUT IT WOULD BE ONE ROCK MORE THAN WAS NECESSARY TO CONVEY THE IDEA OF "SOME ROCKS." A Nancy panel is an irreduceable concept, an atom, and the comic strip is a molecule. With 5-Card Nancy we create new molecules out of Ernie's atoms." Sweet. Thanks Quidsocoles!
  • Fantastic: Mrs Dotcom's moniker is Nancy so we shall play this and report back!