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Calvin Ball: Difference between revisions
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Also, the trope does not include games to which every single rule has not been given. If the basic structure of the game is laid out it is not an example of '''Calvin Ball'''. After all these are fictional games which appear in some kind of narrative, and we should not expect a full manual of rules to interrupt the flow of the story.
Also see [[Pac-Man Fever]], where writers create Calvinball out of video games (intentionally or not) -- all we know is that most involve levels where you [[Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000|kill everyone]] with lots and lots of [[Button Mashing]] and joystick swinging -- ''far'' more than what a game should have. See [[
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Bobobo-Bo
* ''[[Bleach]]'': In [[Filler|Episode 303]], the shinigami play a karuta card game. It's originally supposed to be based on a real game but [[Killer Rabbit|Yachiru]] doesn't bother explaining the rules. Players get ejected on the basis of made-up rules and things quickly degenerate into chaos with [[Functional Magic|kidou]] and [[Personality Powers|shikai]] being liberally thrown around. And then [[Finishing Move|bankai]] reduces everything to [[Law of Disproportionate Response|rubble]]...
* Duel Monsters from ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' is basically this, especially in the early story arcs before a more concrete set of rules was established; even then, new cards were constantly introduced that changed the existing rules, to the extent that the series was formerly the [[Trope Namer]] for [[New Rules as the Plot Demands]].
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== Fan Works ==
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series]]'' often portrays the titular "children's card game" this way, mostly as a way of making fun of how complicated the game actually is, and how [[
** Episode 107 of the actual show plays with this as well. After a duel shifts to a dice game, it is declared that the roll of a die will alter each monster's strength. The protagonist declares that his roll doubles his power, while his opponent's...
{{quote|'''Nesbitt:''' A five! That must be good!
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* The [[Trope Namer]] is frequently played in ''[[Calvin and Hobbes: The Series]]''.
== Film
* In ''[[Fantastic Mr. Fox]]'', the animal school's official sport is Whackbat, an incomprehensible game similar to baseball and cricket played with a flaming pinecone. A sequence of the game in play features animals hitting the pinecone, running around in random directions and even spinning in place.
** "Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine."
*** "Hotbox!"
* From the [[Fun with Acronyms]] Department comes TEGWAR, or '''T'''he '''E'''xciting '''G'''ame '''W'''ithout '''A'''ny '''R'''ules. First seen in the movie ''Bang the Drum Slowly'', it is a game invented by professional baseball players for the sole purpose of winning money off of gullible fans (who, for the most part, are just happy to play a card game with pro baseball players).
* In the audio commentary for ''[[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]'', Dominic Monaghan describes Tig, a passtime that involved the various Hobbit actors tagging each other and saying nonsense words like "tig" and "tog." When Elijah Wood tried to join in, the other actors pretended that it was a real game with rules, and began making them up on the fly so that Elijah was always doing it wrong. Elijah never caught on. A year later, he asked the others why they never played Tig anymore, and they fessed up that it was all a prank.
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* ''[[Con Sentiency]]'' has Gowachin, who organized their legal tradition on the notion that the main threats to justice are being chained by excess of unnecessary laws and precedents or usurped by a self-contained oligarchy of experts. One of the foundations is that "No legal system can maintain justice unless every participant [...] risks life itself in whatever dispute comes before the bar."
* ''[[The Enemy Papers]]'' includes a story from Talman where the teacher introduces as a learning aid some game where one of the moves is change of the rules. Of course, the pupils invariably turn it into a convoluted mess. The lesson would be a spoiler, but it's rather amusing, and makes a good point.
=== Periodicals ===▼
* The trope's first reported instance was in ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' back in the 60s, when they invented a college game called [http://www.madcoversite.com/quiz_olympics.html 43-man Squamish]. Details are sketchy, but when official gear includes a shepherd's crook and flippers, odds are the game wasn't meant to be played anyway. Still, apparently some actual teams were formed for a bit. An excerpt from the rules:▼
{{quote|''A Squamish team consists of 43 players: [[Long List|the left & right Inside Grouches, the left & right Outside Grouches, four Deep Brooders, four Shallow Brooders, five Wicket Men, three Offensive Niblings, four Quarter-Frummerts, two Half-Frummerts, one Full-Frummert, two Overblats, two Underblats, nine Back-Up Finks, two Leapers, and a Dummy]].''}}▼
** An earlier example from ''Mad'' is the late-fifties board game parody [http://erniekovacs.blogspot.com/2007/12/test.html Gringo].▼
** Another was the board game "Three-Cornered Pitney" in 1983, with similarly ridiculous rules, as it was designed by one of the creators of 43-Man Squamish.▼
* The Onion printed a sport called "Snøkåathlaan" for the 2010 Winter Olympics, complete with history, rules, and athletes to watch.▼
== Live-Action TV ==
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** Calvin seems to be fond of games with impossibly convoluted rules, even though he's not very good at regular baseball, let alone the variation with over two dozen bases spread out over half the neighborhood, entire "ghost" teams and usually ending in a [[Big Ball of Violence]] with Hobbes.
* ''[[Frazz]]'' had a week dedicated to [https://web.archive.org/web/20100822141721/http://comics.com/frazz/2006-05-01/ Bedlamball]. Not surprising, considering the Wild Mass Guessing that Frazz is, in fact, adult Calvin.
▲== Periodicals ==
▲* The trope's first reported instance was in ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' back in the 60s, when they invented a college game called [http://www.madcoversite.com/quiz_olympics.html 43-man Squamish]. Details are sketchy, but when official gear includes a shepherd's crook and flippers, odds are the game wasn't meant to be played anyway. Still, apparently some actual teams were formed for a bit. An excerpt from the rules:
▲{{quote|''A Squamish team consists of 43 players: [[Long List|the left & right Inside Grouches, the left & right Outside Grouches, four Deep Brooders, four Shallow Brooders, five Wicket Men, three Offensive Niblings, four Quarter-Frummerts, two Half-Frummerts, one Full-Frummert, two Overblats, two Underblats, nine Back-Up Finks, two Leapers, and a Dummy]].''}}
▲** An earlier example from ''Mad'' is the late-fifties board game parody [http://erniekovacs.blogspot.com/2007/12/test.html Gringo].
▲** Another was the board game "Three-Cornered Pitney" in 1983, with similarly ridiculous rules, as it was designed by one of the creators of 43-Man Squamish.
▲* The Onion printed a sport called "Snøkåathlaan" for the 2010 Winter Olympics, complete with history, rules, and athletes to watch.
== Professional Wrestling ==
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* "Card: The Game". The basic rules for this game are: If it's card-sized and card-shaped, and has a picture and/or a number somewhere on it, it goes. A player starts out with a deck of 60 cards (or anything else that fits the despription of "card" and fits the rule noted above) and begins play by setting any three cards in front of them; one has to have a picture of some sort that represents the "player". or if lacking a picture is something that you can explain as represeting the player ("My card has a heart on; I'm the Queen of Hearts" is perfectly fine logic here), one that reperesents 'mode of transportation', and the last being 'location', AKA where your character card is. Basicly, the game is improvisation based on the cards you pull; as long as what you do has SOMETHING to do with something on the card, it goes. Players try to take actions and respond to other player's actions using improvisation based on whatever numbers or images are on the cards they have either in their hand or placed face-down in front of them specifically to use in defense against other player's actions (whether against them, against another player, or against another player's response to someone ELSE's action, exetera.) ("I have a card with the number nine on it; I'm launching nine cruise missiles at another player." "Hum... Well, I have an Ace of Spades: he goes out and builds an anti-cruise-missile wall around me." "Wait, wait- I have a Jigglypuff! Jigglypuff puts your Ace of Spades to sleep so he can't build your wall." All of this goes.)
==
* In the [[Tom Stoppard]] play ''The Real Inspector Hound'', the characters in the [[Play Within a Play]] play a card game called [[Incredibly Lame Pun|"Pontoon Bridge"]]. They actually play it twice, and the rules aren't remotely similar.
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[[Category:Born in the Funny Papers]]
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