Mornington Crescent

It's like a cross between Double Fanucci and Go Johnny Go Go Go Go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtSvaSZ-xLU), if you're familiar with those games.

mindcrime2• 2 years ago

According to the 1993 annex to the Washburn codification of the rules, the site isihac.net is no longer considered a valid reference, and anybody consulting this site during a game automatically forfeits their turn.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

anybody consulting this site during a game automatically forfeits their turn.

If a Perridale Variation has been invoked and one or more players are in Nid then the forfeiture rule does not apply.

KineticLensman2• 2 years ago

That's NumberWang!

afandian12• 2 years ago

I think that given the HN audience, we should really be playing the Atlantic version. Not only is the spelling partially reversed, but the Perridale Variation is reduced to a single direction. Forfeiture rules are therefore irrelevant. It's significantly simpler, but it's more engaging for a beginner audience.

gbxyz• 2 years ago

Teaching an LLM to play Mornington Crescent https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGejrSJfE/

IanCal2• 2 years ago

Nice!

GPT-4 can play, it will actually pick up on what you're doing and follow along. It's a bit stilted if it's got its history of explaining what places are, though does pick up on inventing move names and similar. It'll follow your lead if you start invoking random rules & history.

Given your astute deployment of the reverse-polish maneuver to Angel, it's clear I must think creatively to maintain a competitive stance in our game. Angel's position on the Northern Line presents an intriguing array of tactical responses.
In light of this, and adhering to the spirit of our pre-98 rule set, I will execute a move that's both unexpected and steeped in the lore of our game. I navigate to Stratford, invoking the East London Shuffle.

https://chat.openai.com/share/6a275e17-ea27-4c35-b0a3-6d9f2c...

henrikschroder4• 2 years ago

You can play this game in it's simplest form with children, to teach them about anticipation and social cues and hidden rules.

The base game is super simple. You go around taking turns, each player saying a London underground station - or pick a similar, familiar, enumerable set - and the first one who says Mornington Crescent wins the game. When someone does, you quickly announce the winner and immediately start a new round.

If you play it with children, see how long it takes them to realize that the fun lies in not saying the winning station. And how much fun you can have by anticipating what the others are going to say.

afandian12• 2 years ago

My wife and I are convinced that Pokemon is a giant secret extended game of Mornington Crescent played by the younger generation. Which is a comfort.

bitwize2• 2 years ago

I'm convinced that corporate Agile is a Mornington Crescent-like game in which a team pretends to be an effective team that responds to vague, changing requirements with adaptable solutions... but they're really engaged in appeasing upper management, who have already set a budget and a deadline, with burndown charts and good JIRA velocity numbers.

vundercind• 2 years ago

Anyone got other good social-games for kids?

I’ll contribute: Questions, in which one attempts to carry on a “conversation” consisting entirely of questions that may not be nonsensical or non-sequiturs. First person to ask a garbage/illegal question or to make a statement, loses. Traditionally initiated with “would you like to play questions?”

And: some of the imagination games from Impro can be good. Collaborative automatic writing (though the adult will need to self-censor a bit); tricking a kid who “can’t think of stories” into writing a story by asking you questions about a “secret story” you wrote (you did no such thing—of course you eventually clue them in that they’re far more imaginative than they believed), that kind of stuff.

crooked-v• 2 years ago

Did you know that Whose Line Is It Anyway has some great examples of that first game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cX8KLOb0w8

stavros5• 2 years ago

I don't understand this. Why wouldn't I just immediately say Mornington Crescent? And why would I anticipate what the next person says? Why don't they just say Mornington Crescent? This is baffling.

martynr• 2 years ago

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part

4ndrewl• 2 years ago

Northfields

frereubu3• 2 years ago

Perhaps listening to a game would help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lziCsPmlbZI

PaulRobinson8• 2 years ago

You can if you're playing the 1972 West Kensington Consortium rules but most players consider this rather poor form.

mikhailfranco3• 2 years ago

One tease is to mention stations nearly adjacent to Mornington Crescent, and see if the other contestants take the bait. Of course, a 9-dan player will acknowledge the potential move, but then give a preposterous, but perfectly valid, reason why it cannot be accomplished.

henrikschroder4• 2 years ago

Why wouldn't I just immediately say Mornington Crescent?

Congratulations, you win! Let's play another round. I'll start.

Tottenham Court Road. Your turn.

(Also, thank you for illustrating why this is a good exercise that a lot of people - including you - would benefit greatly from!)

noteness• 2 years ago

There is an esolang based on this: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent

philipwhiuk2• 2 years ago

A bit tedious if you have to provide the line.

afandian12• 2 years ago

Always nice to see one's national parlour sport on the HN front page. It may seem completely impenetrable on initial and deeper inspection, but I'm sure us Brits will be happy to try to answer any questions.

tetris11• 2 years ago

Everyone forgets that the original rules were based on the idea that stations that had k=3 shared nearest neighbours couldn't be used, and that adjacency was measured by DBSCAN clustering, instead of Leiden partitions that the kids use now.

The game has gotten lazy since I were a lad.

afandian12• 2 years ago

I think that only came in once the signalling went metric? Earl's Court (last time I looked) still had some originals. It's always been shades of grey.

IanCal2• 2 years ago

It's always been shades of grey.

For home games, and perhaps for even local leagues, sure. But the IMCF (the International Mornington Crescent Federation, not the International Mornington Crescent Foundation) has been clear on this since the '86 upset.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Sure granddad, that's all very well if you're playing the classical time limit - but with the rise of fast-paced online play, the old way just isn't scalable. The big providers just can't afford it, so long as everyone expects their games to be hosted for free.

And so what if kids these days are playing a slightly different game - can't we celebrate the fact they're playing at all, instead of engaging in this elitist gatekeeping?

afandian12• 2 years ago

Without that “gatekeeping” the game would have descended into confused chaos, with no clear rules long ago. Maybe it’s time for change, but we should be grateful that there is still a game to play.

eternityforest• 2 years ago

Is that actually true? I thought it was originally played with the Havershorm criteria, and graph theory wasn't a big thing until the Oxford Five got involved in formalizing rules?

Have I been misled?

afandian12• 2 years ago

Check Mordent and Ravensworth.

jameshart• 2 years ago

The problem is now computer software like Stockwell exists that can tell you in real time what the ‘correct’ move is, kids have learned a sort of mechanical version of the game with no creativity or flair. The meta has just become always straddle, and progress southwards on odd traversals. If you watch random Crescent games streaming on Twitch you’ll wind up watching two anime avatars circling round Kensington until one of them’s able to take swabbage and expand the domain. So dull.

iamthemonster• 2 years ago

I thought you couldn't take swabbage on the Circle and District lines, so that excludes South Kensington and Kensington High Street. Kensington Olympia is on the Overground, which is out of bounds, and is only accessible on the District line on the weekends and SOME public holidays.

So if you're seeing people on Twitch taking swabbage on Kensington Olympia in tournament play (and we know tournaments are on Saturdays only) then you know they're deepfakes.

Stay safe out there.

ribs• 2 years ago

See, this here is the -real- problem: prescriptivist tendencies in those players of a certain age who insist that, say, the Coltonshire Maneuver’s success must be determined by the application of what is rightfully analogous to the reading of chicken entrails. Read the room! The shift is towards rightbottom. LET IT SHIFT. You can always deploy cannons at High Barnet to prevent map-bleed.

ntoll• 2 years ago

I wonder what old school international grandmasters like Theydon Bois (France), Pim Li Ko (China) and Will Esden-Green (UK) would think of the modern game... We've lost the creativity, bravery and elegance of such players, from a time when taking part was more important than winning.

PaulRobinson8• 2 years ago

I've got a lot of hope for the Google DeepMind attempt to solve Mornington Crescent to add creativity back into the game, like they did for Go.

The problem is that Google seem to be struggling to get the computing power and algos together to deploy nib effectively and to square out the down flows when dealing with Lancashire Pushback - which you must have in a modern game playing against a top player. It's one of those things that seems still out of grasp of ML...

mikhailfranco3• 2 years ago

Yeah, the Djikstra Gambit put a stop to that line of play long ago.

Not a total Moorgate, but certainly rare these days.

amiga3863• 2 years ago

I know there are a lot of ISIHAC fans here, and they love seeing parlour games like Mornington Crescent played with skill, panache and verve, especially when expertly compered by a sexy and stunning host.

I'll just link to a recent game that everyone will get a kick out of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwerGS2x5xc

regularfry• 2 years ago

With no disrespect to the players or the moves played, that does feel - to me, at least - like deviation.

denton-scratch• 2 years ago

compered by a sexy and stunning host.

Are you referring to the Magnificent Sven?

amiga3863• 2 years ago

While both the tree-trunk in trunks himself, and the ever-delightful Samantha bring glamour to the proceedings, it's the sunny disposition and cheerful optimism of the Chairman that gets audiences in the mood.

Symbiote5• 2 years ago

It's years since I've played this, so forgive me if I miss some of the intricacies of the recent St Hillary changes, I'm more familiar with the XVI edition rulebook.

Denmark Hill.

afandian12• 2 years ago

Angel.

(St Hillary Changes have roundly been seen as whitewash, and rarely affect game-play)

Symbiote5• 2 years ago

I'll risk High Street Kensington...

ubermonkey• 2 years ago

If you like this, you may also enjoy 43-Man Squamish, from Mad Magazine:

https://archive.org/details/mad-43-man-squamish-mad-095/mode...

frereubu3• 2 years ago

A couple of good games for those who want to study some of the lesser-known variations of the rules:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lziCsPmlbZI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqLIvLCwxLo

nrawe• 2 years ago

I know that there's probably a lot of people who feel this, but as a lifelong fan of ISIHAC it gave me immense pleasure to go to the station a few years ago on a trip to London. There was an odd look from a person on the platform when I said "Mornington Crescent" aloud to myself and asked them to take my picture with the sign!

ISIHACs blend of silliness underwritten with high intelligence is unmatched contrast contemporary comedy, in my eyes.

zubairq• 2 years ago

I remember around 1996 people telling me about "Mornington Crescent", what I thought was an inside joke at the time as it was supposed to be a station that could never be reached! I had no idea that it was an actual game!

Funnily enough I also passed it recently and the train stopped there, and I was left really confused!

thih9• 2 years ago

That’s numberwang.

(For another nonsense tv game show, see https://thatmitchellandwebb.fandom.com/wiki/Numberwang! )

BerislavLopac• 2 years ago

There is a video showing what playing the game looks like in practice [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYrue4oXCbo

benj111• 2 years ago

Numberwang!

cmacleod4• 2 years ago

When I moved to London in my 40s I was gobsmacked to find that Mornington Crescent was a real Tube station. I had always assumed it was just invented for the purpose of the game! :-o

mikhailfranco3• 2 years ago

Novices might need this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_London_Underground_sta...

stoneman242• 2 years ago

With the renaming of the overground lines, we’ll need to rename some of the more obscure openings and rewrite sections of the rules [0]

[0]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68296483

Mornington Crescent

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