Welcome to BlogNomic, a self-modifying game where changing the rules is a move. Players make blog posts proposing alterations to the ruleset, discussing and casting votes in the comments: if enough vote in favour, the rules are changed and play continues.

The game has been running since 2003 and resets every month or so. Have a look around the wiki for more information and history, or join our Discord. New players are always welcome to join the game at any time.

Friday, May 02, 2025

Proposal: More Bait More Switch

In the rule “Preparation”, add a row to the table with the following text;

|-
! Plant Decoy
|
* The unique type and trait of an Artifact that exists in the publicly tracked list of Artifacts
* The letter of a Spot that meets all of the following criteria:
** Is not an Ingress or a Station
** Is not Connected to an Ingress or a Station
** Is not the Location of an Artifact
** Is not the target of another unresolved Plant Decoy
|| Onsite || If the Agent is a Guard, the Location of the specified Artifact is privately tracked by the Concierge to be the Spot specified in that Plant Decoy action rather than the original Location of that Artifact, but the publicly tracked Home of that Artifact remains unchanged. If the Agent is not a Guard, this Prep has no Effect.

 

A revised version of the earlier Bait and Switch proposal that fits with the latest revision to Preparation.

Proposal: The Interdynastic Scoreboard

In the “Building Blocks” section of the ruleset, create a new rule, “Interdynastic Scoreboard”:

Each Agent and idle Agent has an Interdynastic Score, tracked on the [[Interdynastic Scoreboard]] wiki page (only nonzero scores are listed individually – zero scores are combined into a single “everyone else” entry). Interdynastic Score is a number defaulting to 0. When this rule is added to the ruleset, if it was in the ruleset previously, each Agent and idle Agent regains the Interdynastic Score they had at the time that this rule was repealed (if any).

Rules other than this one can only change an Agent’s Interdynastic Score as a consequence of a Declaration of Victory, and only by increasing it. An Agent’s Interdynastic Score cannot be increased by more than 100 over the course of a single dynasty. When writing proposals that add victory conditions, Agents are encouraged to make that proposal also amend the dynastic ruleset such that upon the enactment of a Declaration of Victory, it increases each Agent’s Interdynastic Score by a number from 0 to 100 based on how close that Agent was to winning.

At the end of the last paragraph of “Guards and Burglars”, add

When a Declaration of Victory is enacted, each Agent gains Interdynastic Score equal to that Agent’s Successes, times 100, divided by the maximum number of Successes across all Agents, rounded to the nearest integer.

One common problem that BlogNomic has is that it’s single-winner, and that means that a) players who don’t have a chance to win don’t have much of a reason to do anything, and b) in dynasties where pooling of resources is possible, that encourages players to randomly select who to pool resources onto, giving players who are behind a nonzero chance to win, but often making most of the dynasty’s conventional gameplay pointless in the process.

I’ve thought for a while that it would make sense to give players a reason to try to improve their own position in the dynasty even if they are too far behind to win – that way, players who were too far behind would have something to do, and players would have an incentive not to pool (or at least, not to spend too much on pooling) because they would be hurting their own score. But because the position has to be measured at the end of the dynasty, it has to be something that persists into future dynasties. Making it a simple scoreboard, where each player is scored from 0 to 100 based on how well they did in the dynasty, seems to have the desired properties.

At present, Interdynastic Score doesn’t do anything, but it might in the future – I have been considering that maybe it would be safe to reintroduce mantle-passing rules as long as players were restricted to only passing the mantle to players who had had few dynasties compared to their Interdynastic Score counts (so that players couldn’t intentionally hurt their own position in the dynasty in return for a mantle pass, which is the reason why we repealed mantle-passing). But I’ll leave that for future proposals, and just stick to the simplest possible implementation for now.

Proposal: In and Out the Back Door 2

In the Effect of the Prep “Back Door” in “Preparation”, change

Until the end of the next Break-In, the specified Spot is considered to connect to “Grounds” for the purpose of determining whether Routes submitted by Burglars are complete.

to

Until the end of the next Break-In, the specified Spot is considered to connect to “Grounds” for the purpose of determining whether Routes submitted by Burglars are complete, as long as that lettered Spot appears at least twice in that Route.

Reproposing this, but now affecting the correct rule.

Thursday, May 01, 2025

Proposal: In and Out the Back Door

Revisable 0-1 with 3 REVISE votes. Failed-revise by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 May 2025 20:33:31 UTC

In “The Back Door”, change

When this action is performed, until the next Break-In action has completed, the specified Spot is considered to connect to “Grounds” for the purpose of determining whether Routes submitted by Burglars are complete.

to

When this action is performed, until the next Break-In action has completed, the specified Spot is considered to connect to “Grounds” for the purpose of determining whether Routes submitted by Burglars are complete, as long as that lettered Spot appears at least twice in that Route.

Yet another fix suggestion for the 100% Burglar strategy. Normal routes that use Back Doors will probably use them twice – once to enter and once to leave – so this disallows the Back Door + Quick + Distraction snipe strategy via requiring the Burglar to stay around longer, whilst not meaningfully stopping anything else.

Proposal: Scaling 2

Make these changes to both the main and shadow rulesets

Add “The Round Number is publicly tracked on the gamestate tracking page and defaults to 4”

In “The Break-In” replace

If any Burglar who Encountered no Guards during this atomic action is holding at least one Artifact, increase the Successes of all Burglars by one, including Sidelined Burglars; otherwise, increase the Successes of all Guards by 1, including Sidelined Guards.

with

If any Burglar who Encountered no Guards during this atomic action is holding at least one Artifact, increase the Successes of all Burglars by the round number, including Sidelined Burglars; otherwise, increase the Successes of all Guards by the round number, including Sidelined Guards.
Increase the Round Number by 1

Replace Agent’s successes with the following

ais523: 6
Clucky:  6
Darknight: 3
DoomedIdeas: 5
JonathanDark: 0
lendunistus: 1
qenya: 4
trapdoorspyder: 2

Proposal: Bait and Switch

Revise-Withdrawn, 1-1 with 5 REVISE votes. Failed-revise by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 May 2025 19:28:29 UTC

In the rule “Preparation Actions”, add a subrule named “Decoy” with the following text;

“Plant Decoy” is a virtual Preparation Action that any Guard can perform, and the following must be specified to perform it:
* The unique type and trait of an Artifact that exists in the publicly tracked list of Artifacts
* The letter of a Spot that is not an Ingress or a Station, is not Connected to an Ingress or a Station, and is not the Location of an Artifact

When Plant Decoy is resolved, the Location of the specified Artifact is privately tracked by the Concierge to be the Spot specified in that Plant Decoy action rather than the original Location of that Artifact, but the publicly tracked Home of that Artifact remains unchanged.

This is the counterplay for the “Back Door + Distractions” play by the Burglars. It’s prevented from being too powerful by the fact that you can only Decoy one Artifact per Guard that is able to perform a Preparation Action. The Burglers can still use “Back Door + Distractions”, but now they have to guess at which Artifact is not a Decoy.

I didn’t want to make this a “any Agent can perform” because then we get into multiple Agents planting a Decoy on the same Artifact and which one would take priority. Suggestions are welcome if we really want to enable Burglars to Plant Decoys as well.

Proposal: [Appendix] [Building Blocks] Anonymous Actions

Popular, 7-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 May 2025 19:24:28 UTC

In the Appendix rule “Representations of the Gamestate”, replace:

The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate, tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action

with

The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate. Unless the rule defining the action specifies otherwise, this occurrence is tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action

In the Building Blocks rule “Virtual Actions”, add the following text:

When the performance of a Virtual Action causes the modification of publicly tracked gamestate, the Concierge should publicly track the historical fact of the occurrence of that Virtual Action on behalf of the Agent who initiated that Virtual Action, using the Concierge’s own name in that public tracking, and privately track the historical fact of the occurrence of that Virtual Action using the name of the Agent who initiated that Virtual Action.

Similar to what qenya was suggesting in the comments on Rumor Mill, but allowing the Concierge to track the occurrence of the gamestate change publicly while only required to track the original initiator of the Virtual Action privately rather than publicly.