Friday, January 30, 2009

Better Not Go There...

Apparently, in addition to poker being illegal in South Carolina, so is every card game but whist and any game that uses dice. Wow. That's most of the games I play. I mean, I expect poker to be illegal most places, but D&D, Family Business, Guillotine, Uno, Monopoly, Risk? No Warhammer 40K, no Battletech, no Advanced Squad Leader, no Rail Baron? No Star Fleet Battles?*

No collectible card games, obviously... No Magic, Pokemon... I think Mage Knight (apparently now defunct, according to wikipedia, which I didn't know) and Hero Clix would be okay.

Just about all roleplaying games but Amber, Nobilis, and live-action games where you use rock-paper-scissors would be illegal. Most (but not all) boardgames too, depending on how you interpret whether a games is a "game with cards," as the statue reads. That would eliminate a lot of games where there aren't any dice and aren't cards in the traditional sense, as in cards you play. That is to say, games where, say, your character is described on a card but you don't "play" the card, for instance. I know there are good examples of such games, but of course I'm not coming up with one...

Well, not a board game, but the game of Mafia (also called, apparently, 'Werewolf' or 'Assassin') is one. The players are each given a card to secretly tell them what side they are on (the game is about trying to eliminate the other team, but only the smaller team members know who is on their team, the other other side is guessing). The only point of the cards is to randomly (and secretly) assign teams. It can be played without cards, with slips of paper, for instance, instead, which I doubt anyone would construe as "cards," but if you buy the commercially available version of the game, it uses cards.

So, is Mafia illegal if you buy the game and use the cards, but not if you use slips of paper? The cards aren't "played" in the traditional sense, in that you don't take tricks with them or anything like that, but it still, technically, if you buy the commercial version of the game and play it, you would be playing a "game with cards," wouldn't you?

Civilization! That's it, right? No dice, as I recall. But it has card decks for random events and such. Technically illegal, I guess, even though it isn't a "game with cards" in the traditional sense. Someone over at Volokh suggested Carcassone, but I've only played it once years ago, so I don't remember. (I, and the other guys I played it with, thought it suuuuuuuucked). Kremlin! I think Kremlin is a good example as well.

So let's see. Stratego, I think, would be okay. No cards. Unless it runs afoul of another clause in the law about the board being a "gaming table." Connect Four. Toss-Across. Hmmm... Battleship? It doesn't have any cards, does it?

Craziness. I presume that police in SC aren't on constant stakeouts outside gaming stores down there (I presume they have some gaming stores, right?), so I doubt the law is being enforced outside of poker and gambling, but man! Stay away if you're a gamer. I mean, you never know when the local DA and sheriff will be guys who really hated nerds in high school...

* And here I didn't even know I was a teenage criminal. But apparently I was, because I played Star Fleet Battles in South Carolina on a number of occasions when I was a teenager visiting my friend Paul down in York, SC...

2 Comments:

At 8:14 PM, Blogger R. Paul Wiegand said...

Yes, and I've kept a record of all our games to use against you one day, if the time came.

But if Go is legal, that's all that's really important, right?

 
At 9:53 AM, Blogger mooglar said...

Well, with regard to our past crimes playing Star Fleet Battles, right back at you! Ha!

Go? In South Carolina? Are they even aware that China exists down there? I don't think they have TV or electricity yet...

(I kid, I kid...)

 

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