Mornington Crescent (game)

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Mornington Crescent is a game created and popularized by the BBC Radio 4 programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (ISIHAC). Named after the Mornington Crescent tube station, players make moves by announcing the names of stations on the London Underground, the winner being the first to announce "Mornington Crescent".

Spoiler warning: New players may prefer not to read the following explanations.

The game is intended as a parody of complicated strategy games, and particularly satirises the complex rules and terminology that evolve around games such as chess.

Contents

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Gameplay

Players take turns making a "play" or "move", each of which consists of the name of a station on the London Underground, while a chairman (on ISIHAC, Humphrey Lyttelton) officiates. The first player to announce "Mornington Crescent" wins.

Over time the selection of destinations has strayed well beyond the stations of the London Underground, generally for comic effect. There have also been local variants such as the Slough version and Scottish variants during the Edinburgh Fringe (the show is often recorded on location). In one game, recorded at Luton, the moves ranged as far afield as the Place de l'Etoile, Nevsky Prospekt and Pennsylvania Avenue. A move to Luton High Street was ruled invalid, as being geographically too far out.

Due to the show's cult status it is also played by fans on Usenet and in web forums, and this has increased the mythology surrounding the rules.

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Rules

Those who write in to the show asking for the rules (as apparently around 200 people a year do) are usually referred to "NF Stovold’s Mornington Crescent: Rules and Origins" and told it is out of print. They are also advised that "your local bookshop might have a copy of The Little Book Of Mornington Crescent by Tim, Graeme, Barry and Humph."

This perpetuates the main joke behind Mornington Crescent: that there are actually no fixed rules at all — the game is played purely for entertainment. The objective, at least on the radio, is instead to derive absurdly complex rules and strategies, in parody of games and sports in which similarly complex systems have evolved. This is an open secret, and few if any of the audience are under any illusion otherwise, but it is possible for people to become involved in the game without realising this, and thus to attempt to play the game seriously. In this way, it bears some resemblance to the party games Take a plane, Scissors, and Mao, in which certain players know "secret" rules. Unlike these games, which actually do have specific but secret rules which new players are expected to figure out, the spirit of Mornington Crescent is to maintain the fiction that the rules are well-defined but numerous, and that gameplay is not arbitrary at all.

As Humphrey Lyttelton says: "[the rulebook is maintained with] inimitable accuracy by the lovely Samantha, who sleeps with it under her pillow. As it now runs to 17 volumes, she is running out of pillows." (Samantha, the beautiful scorer for ISIHAC, is equally fictitious.)

The following summary by Graeme Garden gives a good indication of the kinds of "rules" which are propounded:

  • Boxing out the F, J, O and W placings draws the partner into an elliptical progression north to south
  • In weak positional play, it is vital to consolidate an already strong outer square, e.g., Pentonville Road
  • In a straight rules game, it's inadmissible to transfer inversely, which is otherwise a powerful tactic
  • Opening the triangle will block any of the three possible reverse draws and is usually played early in the game (before the Central Line has been quartered) so that the risk of a diagonal move is negligible, as is the possibility of quartering
  • The lateral shift decisively breaks opponents' horizontal and vertical approaches.
  • The A40 northbound used as a counter-play offers rear access to suburban bidding
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Original rules?

There is some evidence to suggest that in the early days there were a few simple rules which the panellists knew and the audience did not. The fact that the audience did not know the rules was an in-joke for the panel. Since no one would be able to tell the difference, these rules were only loosely followed, and were eventually abandoned altogether. Given that all those intimately connected with the game naturally dissemble about its nature, it is quite hard to pin down what they were, but they may have been based on a 1952 A–Z of London, plus a few basic rules about which pages you could (or could not) turn to from the page you were on. The point of the game was to prevent the opponent turning to the page with Mornington Crescent on it in their next move.

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Recurrent themes

As the "game" has evolved, a number of common themes within the imaginary "rules" have arisen, and these are referred to in asides by the players:

  • Players may be "in Spoon", which limits their actions in unspecified ways.
  • There is a similar state called "Knip", or "Knid".
  • There are set and established plays, similar to openings in chess, normally named after guests who played the game on ISIHAC, such as "Rushton's Gambit". Knightsbridge to Ongar is said to be a favourite move.
  • Certain moves will be applauded by the audience, or greeted with intakes of breath.
  • A move to Mornington Crescent may be predicted some number of moves in advance, as with "mate in 2" in Chess: "Mornington Crescent in 2".
  • Aldwych is a dangerous move.
  • Real-life changes to the London tube network are sometimes alluded to in the game, most notably when the actual tube station at Mornington Crescent was closed and a "rules committee" was said to have rushed through an amendment required for the game to stay playable.
  • Varied rule sets such as "Finsbury rules" are invoked, generally being the subject for further asides in the game ("No, the secondary oblique is blocked on the lower diagonal...").
  • Once a player has named Dollis Hill, other players will often groan in anguish in anticipation of the forthcoming "Dollis Hill loop"; thereafter every alternate move must be Dollis Hill until the loop is "escaped" somehow.

An immediate victory did occur once on air in ISIHAC— but only after the player claiming it had spent four minutes explaining the particular "rules" he was invoking.

In play by fans these rules and variations are routinely extended and embellished.

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Culture of secrecy

Part of the fun (and most of the point) is pretending the rules are real. Allusions are made to an elusive rulebook, and to Stovold, and the supreme obscurity of the rules is a principal source of humour. Players may make reference to the International Mornington Crescent Society (IMCS), allegedly the dominant rule-making body for the game.

Among Mornington Crescent fans it is almost taboo to admit that the rules are fictitious.

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Publications

In the 1990s, Radio 4 broadcast a Christmas special: Mornington Crescent Explained, a "two-part documentary" on Mornington Crescent, with part one being a history of the game through the ages and part two being the rules. At the end of the broadcast of part one it was announced that part two had been postponed due to scheduling difficulties...

Part two was broadcast on Christmas Eve 2005. It was named "In Search of Mornington Crescent" and narrated by Andrew Marr.[1]

Two books of 'rules' and history have been published, The Little Book of Mornington Crescent (2001; ISBN 0752844229) by Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer and Humphrey Lyttelton, and Stovold's Mornington Crescent Almanac (2001; ISBN 0752847295) by Graeme Garden.

In the late 1980s, Roger Heyworth, a director of Gibson's Games, mooted the idea of publishing a Mornington Crescent game consisting of an empty box containing a flyer promoting a club for aficionados. The plan was abandoned because of the number of customer complaints that it was expected to generate. In the late 1990s, he approached the BBC with a card game design but this was rejected because it was insufficiently silly.

Starting in 1997 an attempt was made to create an actual serious playable version of Mornington Crescent, by means of a nomic. This was inspired by the propensity of nomics to create subgames and the observation that nomic players keep tweaking their nomics to keep them interesting to play. Mornington Nomic was a successful nomic for a while, and indeed succeeded in producing an interesting and playable game that matches the form of Mornington Crescent. While the nomic wound down in 2001, the resulting set of rules for Mornington Crescent remains.

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Variants

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Cultural references

  • Science fiction writer Michael Moorcock included a reference to the game in a comic book which he scripted, entitled Michael Moorcock's Multiverse. Since the comic was published in the US, the reference was clearly an in-joke for any British readers who happened to get hold of an imported copy, or US readers who are fans of the radio show.
  • In 1995, the British indie band My Life Story released an album called Mornington Crescent. This was partly a reference to the station (which at the time was closed for repairs, prompting widespread — though ultimately incorrect — rumours that it would not be re-opening) and partly to the game, whose esoteric, "in-joke" nature seemed to fit well with the group's unusual orchestral sound.
  • Item #101 of the 2005 University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt was for one player on each team to "participate in an email adaptation of the classic game Mornington Crescent", using the CTA rail system. Participants were warned, "We shall follow the standard Thurgood-Hamilton conversion algorithm, but banning semi-lateral shunts." [2]
  • After the death of Willie Rushton, one of ISIHAC's long-time participants, in 1996, his life was commemorated by a blue plaque in the ticket office of Mornington Crescent Tube Station in 2002.
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Similar games

  • The Glass Bead Game in Hermann Hesse's eponymous novel bears some resemblance to Mornington Crescent, although the spoken game moves in the book are supposed to be genuinely deep and meaningful.
  • Stanley Random Chess is a playable chess variant with invented elements, having a creative commentary reminiscent of Mornington Crescent.
  • The card game Mao includes rules similar to Mornington Crescent in that the new player must try to learn the rules by observations and it is taboo to spell out the rules. Unlike Mornington Crescent, the rules of Mao are very rigid, though they change from round to round, and from group to group as well.
  • Online satirical gaming magazine Critical Miss featured rules for a card game called Clique, a parody of collectable card games that used printed cards and spurious spoken rules to confuse onlookers.
  • Calvin and Hobbes' Calvinball bears some resemblance to this game.
  • One episode of Garden and Brooke-Taylor's television series, The Goodies (also starring Bill Oddie) featured a card game called "Spat", which bore many similarities to Mornington Crescent. In it a hapless Bill was being taught Spat by Graeme and Tim but kept on accidentally breaking the increasingly surreal rules.
  • The British sitcom The League of Gentlemen features a card game indirectly inspired by Mornington Crescent called Go Johnny Go Go Go Go which has rules which appear to be entirely fictional (or deliberately overcomplex and obfuscated) for the purposes of defrauding naive players.
  • In the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" (broadcast in 1968), Captain Kirk spontaneously invents a card game called fizzbin after being captured, in order to distract the henchmen guarding him. Fizzbin supposedly has extremely complex and confusing rules, similar to Mornington Crescent.
  • In one episode of the television series The Monkees, the character of Mickey Dolenz (played by the actor of the same name) invents a card game known as Creebage on the fly, also, as in the Star Trek episode, to distract an old-style gangster holding him captive. This game also has incomprehensible rules. While the gangster is distracted, Mickey escapes, with the gangster holding up some cards and shouting, "But, I have a creebage!"
  • An episode of Friends featured a card game called Cups, which one character (Chandler) had devised as a method of giving money to another character (Joey) without Joey realizing it. Thus, Chandler made up rules on the fly so that he would always lose. (Unfortunately, Joey then played the game with another character, and lost all the money he had won.)
  • Progress Quest, a satire of MMORPGs, is discussed as a deep and involving game despite being a program with no interactivity. Forum discussions will include gameplay tips, strategies, and hints, or give favorable reviews and boast of in-game accomplishments, while those who question the program as not being a real game are derided. Hidden features, including a fully 3D version, are also mentioned.
  • The World Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) Society maintains a website with elaborate strategy guides for the game, descriptions of tournaments, the RPS Strategy Guide, and the like.
  • One Up, One Down, a Drinking game. Ask around...someone at the party can elucidate for you. (But no Cheating!)
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External links

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