Comment by robot-wrangler

> anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun [..] The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story

Yep exploring this question collaboratively is of course the real activity. Depending on your perspective it's barely recognizable as a game, or it's the ultimate / only game. Also kinda related here is Carse on finite and infinite games and Wittgenstein on language games[1,2]. It is "only" philosophy, but also feels ripe for more rigorous treatment

Presumably a good theoretical treatment would try to look at how games and their meta's are related: how the number and stability of rules changes the richness of interaction, enjoyment, flexibility in strategy, average duration and tolerable length of game-play, etc

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22379733M/Finite_and_infinit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)