Recently, I played a game of Uno that was only sorta like Uno. None of us were 100% on the exact rules, so they were largely negotiated over the course of the game. One person had played fairly recently and so took the lead on determining the finer points of the regulations of play, but everybody had some say. It was probably the most fun I've had playing Uno possibly ever. And I've played the version with the mechanical card spitter.

   There were times I thought what the group had decided wasn't quite what would've been in the missing manual, but once I got past that reflex of know-it-all-itude I struggle with, it was far more engaging then Crazy Eights. The rules weren't unpredictable (too much) once they were set, but setting them was a process. This was a public group, not a game between familiar friends, so the intermittent determinations provided a topic of low-stakes conversation that required compromise and co-operation. 10/10. Would recommend as an icebreaker activity.

   You may be familiar with the game of Crazy Eights. It, too, is sorta like Uno, except you can use a standard deck of suited cards. In brief:

The dealer gives each player 8 cards. The remaining cards are placed in the middle of the play area, and the top card is turned face-up next to it. Each player then plays on the card on top of this discard pile by matching either suit or number. If you use a French deck, which is probably most common, the 8 of each suit is wild, the jacks cause the next player to miss their turn, and 2s cause them to pick up two cards at the beginning of their turn. Most people I've played with have the queen of spades inflict a five-card draw, but not always. The first player with an empty hand wins.
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I really enjoy a variation of the game called Crazy Eights Countdown. Same as before, except rather than immediately win, when a player empties their hand, they then collect 7 cards, and 7 becomes their wild card. So on it goes, until somebody finishes after drawing their final, single-carded hand. Good for about an hour-ish or more, depending on your group size.

   So, Uno. No fancy reverse cards or a wild card that also makes the next player pick up 4 cards, but essentially Uno. Complete with the rule of having to declare when you have one card remaining in your hand or face an 8-card penalty. It's a fun game, pretty quick, and the rules are simple. It also doesn't require a proprietary deck, so it's more accessible.

   In the wake of the emergent Uno game with the group, I was thinking on ways to similarly shuffle up (ay? ay?) Crazy Eights. Like, why not have the draw pile be just that? A big ol' pile. Just a heaping mess of face-down cards. Players could mess it up and sift through it, and the mystery of which card is drawn remains. Disallow reshuffles of the draw pile, and instead of continuing to pick up from it, be forced to draw from another player's hand. Or something. I'm just spitballing here.

   Hey, why not play with a Tarot deck? They can be and once were used that way. Or you could even play with dominos, for a two-dimensional timeline of play. Humans have invented all kinds of "arrange the whatsits with numbers and symbols until your arrangement makes you the winnerman" games, using all kinds of whatsits. Like, could you play Crazy Eights with Pogs? Or hockey cards? Or seashells?

   Because there is a sort of tragic truth about Crazy Eights and similar games: the mechanic of drawing from a deck, however rigorously shuffled through its vigintillions of combinations, mean there is ultimately some set order of play, or at least an optimal one. Caring too much about the particulars can even spoil the true purpose: fun and social cohesion (or just passing time, in the case of the aptly-named Patience (or solitaire, if you like) style of card games).

   I'm not sure if people still play it, but there was a game people around me would play when I was a youth. I never played it. I never understood it, really. Apologies in advance, if people do still play it and you are one of them. It is just called "The Game", and you lose by thinking about it. Every so often, I'd be sitting in a group, and somebody would say, "I lost," and there would be a chorus of groans. It was a popular game.

   It is, to my thinking, a very silly game. You can only lose, and you are always playing. In fact, there is nothing to the game but losing. So, I never played. I don't resent losing, exactly, but I do have a strong distaste for games where I feel the determination of winning or losing is entirely out of my control. But, "The Game" does meet that one criterion of encouraging social cohesion. If nothing else, it was something to bond over. Even my avowed disengagement is probably a sort of meta-level participation.

   But, even having come to appreciate that aspect of "The Game", I still could never enjoy it, because it doesn't really seem fun, and not all social cohesion is necessarily good. There is a great degree of social cohesion in high-control groups ("cults" is an unfair and inaccurate label), for example. There is also no winning in those situations, either, and losing generally tends to involve thinking, too. But, there are loads of games people play like "The Game", in even more socially-acceptable settings.

   My experience of socialising itself is a bit like that. It's obviously a game, with rules and orders of play and such. But if you mention that, you lose. You can't just point out the biases on which the game is built. Well, maybe someone can, but only if they are the sort of person outlined by those biases, and only if they otherwise keep playing the game.

   Politics, of course, are all about this. I don't condone violence as a tool for change, nor would I use it as one, but I worry that if some parliamentarian pretended to care about affordability at a close-enough range, I'd be tempted to bite their nose off. Parliaments were practically invented to play that game: of caring about people's concerns. But, of course you can't just call them thieves and liars and ask them, "hey, if you care so much, why do you do everything but solve the problem?" No, because even if we all know those things to be true to the point of tropery, presenting them as actual and actionable problems is against the rules of the game.

   These are games played out of habit, mostly, but, I mean, somebody started them, right? Somebody determined the rules, even if not all at once. With games like that - games we only tend to call "games" in the context of their theory - the rules can almost assuredly be the invention of someone from the group whose members tend to win. We don't play the money game because it suits all of us. We play it because somebody who benefited from controlling the food supply invented meaningless tokens people would have to exchange for the grain they had just harvested the month before. Then the rules just got built on over time, until they are now too numerous and esoteric for anyone to possibly understand. Nonetheless, the same kinds of people continue to win this silliest of games.

   So, I would like to add a couple more must-have qualities for games. First, games should be fun for everybody involved, whether or not they were given the choice to play (though, informed consent is a just a great thing, all-around); second, the rules should be something freely-discussed and changeable (provided all changes adhere to the above quality of universal enjoyment). Otherwise, any game, however innocuous, risks becoming a sort of minor tyranny. Untethered from a board or a deck of cards, social, political, and economic games are often major ones. How many of us can say we're actually having fun playing them?