My stories, a look back - #4: Manehattan Moo · 11:58pm Aug 17th, 2021
They say write what you know, which often makes me feel woefully lacking in life experience, because I can never think of stuff to write about. Manehattan Moo, however, is an exception. This is one of the few fics that only I really can write, because as far as I can tell, very few people had the experience that I did when playing the card game Mao. (Or at least, nobody ever talks about the game but me).
Mao is an infamously divisive card game, with people who love it to bits and people who detest it vehemently. I'm told there are some people between those two extremes too, in which case, any of you guys fancy a game of Mao?
I could spend a whole post talking about Mao on its own, but here's the short version: it's a multiplayer card game where you're not told what the rules are and you have to figure them out yourself by trial and error. When a player wins a round, they get to introduce a new rule, which causes the game to gradually ramp up in complexity.
I was first introduced to the game around 15 years ago in Cambridge, and I fell in love with it immediately. I'd never considered rule-changing as a game mechanic before, and I quickly realized that no two sessions of Mao could ever be the same. It's a nightmare mutant hydra of a game and I absolutely love it, which is why I was incredibly surprised to find that there are people who despise it.
Some people, it turns out, really aren't that keen on games with hidden rules. On some level, I do understand this - obviously, to be punished for something that you couldn't possibly know about or avoid is unfair, and I can see why that might frustrate someone. But, I really think these people are completely missing the point of the game. Mao is a game of logical deduction and trial and error. I can't understand how being penalized in a game can cause distress when the point of the game is literally to learn by doing things wrong.
Manehattan Moo, then, was my attempt to evangelize Mao by showing a bunch of ponies playing it and experiencing all of the highs and lows of the game. It's probably the one of my fics that could most be considered a mouthpiece, since I am obviously biased, but I tried to add a bit of balance by showing a range of reactions to the game, including the fact that some people just don't take to it at all. The reactions are heavily inspired by ones that I've seen in real life when playing the game.
This fic is basically just six ponies sitting around a table, playing a game and talking, so I won't do a blow-by-blow recap on this one, but I'll discuss some of the choices that I made for the fic.
Manehattan Moo
Babs Seed introduces the CMC (and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon) to an Equestrian version of the card game Mao.
November 2014
Slice of Life
The fic starts with Babs Seed, who is visiting Ponyville, setting up a game of "Manehattan Moo", an Equestrian version of the game Mao. Mao tends to be named according to variant; the one I played in Cambridge was called "Cambridge Mao", for example, so I used the same naming convention here. (Obviously, it's the Manehattan variant, because Babs is from Manehattan).
The name "Mao" does apparently refer to Chairman Mao Zedong, although there's some dispute about that - in any case, I didn't feel like trying to explain away the political baggage in-story, so I renamed it to the more Equestrian-sounding "Moo", which I really like as an alternate name. To me, it more fits the silly, frivolous nature of the game.
With Babs are Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Diamond Tiara, and Silver Spoon, a group we colloquially called the "Filly Five" back in the day. Being an avid fan of this grouping, I knew that they were the perfect choice for my card game fic - they had just the right mix of personalities to make it interesting.
I wanted to show the different ways that people react to Mao, and so each of the six fillies have a different role in the story:
* Babs Seed is the one running the game, and also the one who's trying to convince everypony of how good it is, so she's kind of the surrogate for me in this fic.
* Apple Bloom is the neighsayer - she doesn't understand the game, doesn't get on with it at all, and would rather be playing something else, but she can see how passionate Babs is about it and is willing to tolerate it for her.
* Diamond Tiara starts as a skeptic but immediately becomes an acolyte for the game once she realizes its potential. She's fiercely competitive (more so than one really should be, since Mao is not really a competitive game), and she loves the ability to exert control over the game by understanding its secrets.
* Sweetie Belle cottons on to what the game is about almost immediately, realizing and understanding that the game is about paying careful attention and adherence to the rules.
* Silver Spoon enjoys the intellectual challenge of the game. She doesn't really care about winning but about playing with as few mistakes as possible.
* Scootaloo is not particularly good at the game or avoiding penalties, but she's just enjoying playing it with her friends and doesn't really care who wins or loses.
Aside from the card game, the fic is also really just a chance to sit down with six of my favorite fillies and have them talk about stuff. The fic doesn't outright say it, but it implies that the CMC have only recently become friends with Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. There's evidently still a bit of tension between them owing to their history, but they all seem to be giving friendship their best effort. I quite enjoyed writing the banter in these scenes, I felt that it all flowed really well.
This fic is maybe the most straightforward of all the ones I've written. No comedy, no zany antics or magical mishaps, just straight up slice of life with a card game in it.
Trivia
* Silver Spoon's "archets!" curse comes up again. Told you! (She also gets penalized for it, because swearing is against the rules).
* In real Mao, you have to say "Mao" in order to win the round. However, if you say it at any other time, you receive a three-card penalty: "Taking the name of the leader in vain". This is the biggest penalty in the game and an absolute deathtrap for newbies, since obviously someone is going to say it at some point. For Manehattan Moo, since it doesn't have any of the political trappings of Mao, I changed this to "Taking the name of the Great Bovine Deity in vain", and I'm quite pleased with that. I also used that as the chapter title, because it sounded appropriately enigmatic.
* An explanation of the rules introduced in the fic:
---- Babs' "Changeling Queen" rule: Whenever a player plays a Queen, they become the new Changeling Queen. All other players must say "All hail the Changeling Queen". Whenever another player plays a King, the Changeling Queen must "thank their drone" by saying thank you.
---- Diamond Tiara's "Princesses" rule: Modifies the "That's the badger" rule depending on the suit of the card that was played before it; you now have to say "That's the Cadance/Celestia/Luna/Twilight" depending on the suit. This is actually not a very good rule, since it requires players to memorize a rather arbitrary set of four conditions in order to say the right thing.
---- Scootaloo's "Shadow Suit" rule: I can't remember it exactly, but I believe that it changes the behavior of the Jack so that, when a suit is called, a card can now only be anything other than that suit. So if the Shadow Suit is Hearts, any Heart that is played can now be any suit of the player's choice, as long as it's not a Heart. This is also a pretty complicated rule and Babs does call Scootaloo out for it.
---- The "Leapfrog" rule: Can't remember this one exactly either, but I think it was a modification to the Ace (which usually skips the next player's turn) to allow it to skip multiple players instead.
---- The Lilypad: An addendum to the Leapfrog rule: if a player has the Lilypad, then they cannot be Leapfrogged and the turn goes to them instead.
---- "Have a bad/worse night": A change to the "Have a nice day" rule which causes the number of penalty cards to increase by one each time, which causes an arithmetic growth and a rather brutal penalty for anyone who gets hit by a cascade of them.
---- "Eight of Apples": This was a combination of two rules; you usually have to say the name of a Spade when you play it, but someone changed the name of the suit to "Apples"; also, someone introduced a rule which increments the apparent rank of a card by 1, so Silver had to say "Eight of Apples" when she had played a Seven of Spades...
---- "Nine of Mangoes": ... except, by the time this happened, the Apples rule had been superseded by one which renamed the suit to "Mangoes", and a second instance of the rank-incrementing rule had happened, so Silver actually had to say "Nine of Mangoes".
---- "Death to the Changeling Queen"/"Hail Queen Silver Spoon": Sweetie Belle's modification of the "Changeling Queen" rule, allowing a player to kill the Changeling Queen and nominate a new player as the Changeling Queen instead. Putting a tiara on their head was not part of the rule, although as Sweetie Belle says, she wishes she had included that.
---- Crystal Heart Spell: A modification of Diamond Tiara's "Princesses" rule - if three different princesses are invoked in succession, the player must cast the "Crystal Heart Spell", which exchanges their hand with the next player's.
Good stuff
* I thought "MCMC" as an abbreviation for "Manehattan Cutie Mark Crusaders" was pretty good.
* The fic isn't all just one long card game; there are interludes where the fillies are just chatting. I quite liked that I was able to intersperse these moments with the game. It was nice just getting the six talking to each other and I really like the way Diamond in particular plays off most of the others.
* Once Diamond realizes that Babs can be penalized for explaining the rules, she uses that knowledge to her advantage a couple of times, including once to actually stop Babs securing victory. This is rather underhanded and would be considered ungentlemanly play since Babs is trying to make the game easier for them, but that's Diamond Tiara for you.
* My favorite moment is the bit where Diamond forgets the most severe rule-break in the game and Apple Bloom doesn't (because she got hit by it before). And yes, I've seen people make that exact mistake in real life.
Bad stuff
* I mean, it is evangelical, there's no getting away from that even if it was the main point of the fic. As such, story sometimes takes a back seat to the message I'm trying to get across.
* There's still some phonetic accent on Apple Bloom, although it's not too obtrusive.
* I always felt the characterization of the fillies was a little off in this one. I mean, I like the characterizations that I gave them - Diamond's competitive spirit and temper tantrums are really fun - but they feel more like reinterpretations of the characters from the show than those actual characters.
* The ending is weak - Diamond just says "see you later" and that's where it stops, it doesn't really come to any kind of a conclusion. Even for a straightforward slice of life fic, that felt a bit unsatisfying.
If you want a really good but highly specific time playing Mao, go to a LARP and teach people the game in-character. Adds a new layer of excitement when at any time someone at the table could get annoyed at a mystery rule and start committing (fictional) murder.
Just read the is for the first time. Still a lot of the prose tics of being a bit wandering and directionless in the specific construction of paragraphs at times, that I’ve seen in your other early works.
Oh, right, the game. Well, I’ve never played it, and after reading the story, I defiantly wouldn’t want it to be a regular thing, but it does look fun in a kind of “irregular party game” style thing. I need a non-competitive game to de-tense with such things, so that helps. I’m a fast thinker except when I’m not, so I’ve a feeling my performance in Mao could be all over the place.
Anyway, story did a good job exploring the gauntlet of reactions of the game, exploring different personality types both in general (non-game dialogue) and in relation to how that person approaches game theory in general (as sad as it is, it fits that Apple Bloom has the most trouble). The feeling of it being a Mao manifesto is very much present, but since it got me mildly curious in the game, as a once-off, I’d say it worked! Then again, I’m am quite infatuated with tabletop-card games and game theory in general, so in some way, I am probably the ideal audience for this game!
There’s not a whole lot else to say - the fic doesn’t pretend to have much context outside of the game and is even more fluffy then your usual entries. One’s enjoyment of it is going to come down to how much they appreciate these fillies’ personality types playing off each other in a confusing card game that is likely to, at least partly, sail over the audience’s head. It’s definitely too long - at what felt like the halfway point, we were only one-third true, and ditto for halfway feeling like we should have been three-quarters (I’d say, other then tiny trimming here and there, the scene after the time skip is the most obvious culprit for massing trimming.
Anyway, there’s a wrap on reading another story of yours! Will keep chugging away, especially as other interesting not-yet-read entires approach!
5570323
FoME told me that one trick for getting around this is to find someone who does have the relevant experience and ask them. :)
5570586
Is this something you've done?
5570785
I disagree! The whole point of skipping hours ahead was to show - well, firstly, that games of Mao can last hours, which is true - and also to showcase the craziness of what late-game Mao looks like, once a bunch of rules have piled up :) It also carries the story straight into the ending.
5570843
This is absolutely something I've done, yes. We managed to get through a game with no players murdering each other. Monster busted into the tavern though. When I asked for help dealing with the baddie, they gave me a card penalty for talking since one of our rules was no talking unless another rule required it. I got my revenge by casting a Silence spell on them and they couldn't properly announce something they were supposed to call.
5570843
No, you misunderstand me. Obviously that scene is needed. I simply mean it goes on too long. I totally get the point, showing the late-game craziness and dissolving into the conclusion proper. But, when I was reading it, it was doing too much of that over and over - I kept asking myself “I get it already, where is this chunk going?” So I just meant it should get to the point somewhat quicker.
I suppose there may be some merit in showing the craziness prolonged. To me, it just felt draggy by then. Gotta say what you feel, after all!
5570907
I am impressed and slightly terrified by this degree of meta-gaming. I can't even get people to play Mao in the real world :)
Ungentlemanly conduct :)
5570961
Listen, they gave me penalties while I was away from the table because someone was trying to murder me. Really can't stress that enough. They deserved that Silence.