The Rules of The Game
The few things that are the same at every table, meant to be read aloud together before anyone plays.
The Game is not governed by a rulebook in the ordinary sense. What it has is a short set of shared things — the aim, the one question, the moves, the shape of the week and the season, the words, and the way shared things change — printed on The Playcard and said aloud when a Cell forms. Everything else belongs to the table: what it calls things, when it meets, how it tells its stories.
The rules are load-bearing in a particular way: they are the minimum that makes ten thousand tables one Game rather than ten thousand clubs. Read them as obligations and they are few enough to be kept; read them as a constitution and they will be thinner than you expect, because the binding force in this Game is not the rule but the word a person gave. Nothing binds without your own word, and your word is the whole Game.
How they are held. Read them together at the first gathering, aloud, so that everyone has heard the same sentences. Keep the card where people eat. Change them only by Proposal and only at a turning, through The edition; a Cell on the first edition and a Cell on the fifth are still one Game because the numbered lines of The Season Sheet do not change. And test them the way everything below the Goal is tested: they are current best understanding, and a better way written in a sentence is exactly how they improve.
Also called: The Rules · rulebook Stands on: The Playcard · The Twelve Words · Consent Opens onto: The Five Moves · The one question · What the game asks of you · Proposal · The edition · Field of Agreements In play: door · table Sources: The Game at the Table (current best understanding · "the rules that must be the same at every table") · The Playcard (current best understanding) · The Rules of The Game and The Rules (root pages; the first is a one-line pointer to The Seven Commitments of Every Co-Creator) · the Player+ Modules lexicon · lionsberg.wiki: The Rules of The Game Open: The root page by this name is a single line pointing at another page, and does not hold the rules the Little Book prints; the two have not been reconciled. · The Seven Commitments of Every Co-Creator, which that line names, was not opened in this pass. · A Cell's own agreements — its Field of Agreements — and the shared rules are different things, and no page says so plainly.