Mornington Crescent (game)

Mornington Crescent is a game created and popularized by the BBC Radio 4 programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (ISIHAC), a parody of panel games. The game's obscure rules and complex strategies were devised as a parody of the deep analysis favored by afficionados of chess and other such games.

Gameplay

In the basic and most popular form of the game, each player in turn names a station on the London Underground network; the first player to name "Mornington Crescent" wins.

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Many advanced players, however, still prefer the game's orginal form, under which any feature marked in the London A-Z was in play. Use of this guidebook (or a Tube map) is permitted for beginners, although serious players would never resort to it.

Related Topics:
London A-Z - Tube map

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When a novice player asks what other rules govern the order in which stations may be named, he or she is tradtionally told that it would take too long to explain all the rules, and that (unless he or she can find a rulebook) the best way to learn is to observe a few games and "pick them up as you go along." This is not as impossible as it seems, as players often annotate their moves to explain the rules governing or strategies inspiring them. For example, consider the following real game from 1996 (source: http://www.dunx.org/cgi-bin/white-rose/forum?forum=Game2&groupBy=id&group=000&tail=40):

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• Rob: Leamington Road
• James: Stanley Avenue
• Jo: Ealing Broadway (a cunning move on the inside pass)
• Rob: Victor Mews (thus effectively blocking the follow through)
• stephen: Paddington
• Eric: Brixton High Street
• Rob: Albemarle Street
• Jo: Piccadilly (which is allowable under the Finsbury rules; lucky we weren't playing it along with the Exeter Conjunction)
• debra: Russell Square
• Zog The Mighty: North by North-East (to Marble Arch)
• Smiling Rob: Mornington Crescent

As the reference to the "Finsbury rules" suggests, the question of which rules apply in a given game is frequently of great relevance; innumerable variations on the rule-set have been identified and named.

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