I started thinking about one of my old high school friends recently, and then I remembered that he was (one could say) the chairman of Mao at my school, and then I remembered the humiliation of my first game, and the addictive fun of all the other ones. So then I looked it up (also see talk page, which is enlightening re Cambridge origins) and read about some of the history of the different variants of the game. Then I started playing a simple JavaScript MaoBot and I’m hooked again. In my browser it tends to wig out after three to five games and I have to start over, but I don’t mind.
So, I hereby (a) celebrate Web-based Mao and (b) ask about your experiences with Mao: what kind of Mao did you play? Where did you learn it? Who taught you? Where did he/she learn it? Have you introduced anyone to the game? What were the rule differences in your game?
I was taught the game by my friend in high school who I mentioned earlier. He learned it in Japan.
[spoiler]The game we played had no Swearing, Blasphemy or Talking rules. I don’t think any of us knew there were Swearing or Blasphemy rules, but we intentionally took out the Talking rule to make the game more social. It seems from the article like we weren’t the only ones.
Winning a game as non-Mao made you Mao for the next game. Winning a game as Mao meant you could make up a new rule. We had enough contradictory/annoying rules that we seperated our game into various distinct rulesets (I was the one who added the second paragraph in the Wikipedia article, regarding that.) Mao had to open each game either by declaring none of these by saying “This is four-card Mao” or “This is five-card Mao”, or by declaring one of the rulesets by saying “This is four-card Ziploc Bag Mao” etc., and then choosing the direction of play and first player by saying “Play begins to my left/right”.
Also, one of our more fun rule variations was the “mini-game”, where one player would put down a trigger card and then the next player would start some game that would continue in the rotation of play. We used to play the Penis Game, and sometimes we would try to keep a Monty Python dialogue going (one player would say a line from a sketch, the next would say the next line, etc., the first one who doesn’t know their line takes a card).[/spoiler]