741.5 Comics Presents Five-Card Nancy
Introduction
The Game
Hall of Fame

Introduction

Fans of Scott McCloud may already be familiar with the Dadaist card game known as 5-Card Nancy. For those of you who aren't, here are the rules:

  1. Find a reprint book of Nancy strips. Xerox a good portion of the book, and cut up the xeroxes so that you end up with lots of small pieces of paper, each containing only one panel.

  2. Get four or five players. Shuffle and deal everyone five panels face-down (or just have everyone choose five face-down cards from the pile). Pick a panel randomly from the pile and place it face-up on the upper left-hand corner of the playing surface. This is panel one.

  3. Take turns going clockwise around the table. Each person can either put down one of the panels in their hand face-up next to whatever the last panel put down was, or choose to trade in one of their cards for two randomly selected cards from the deck.

  4. When you put a panel down, the other players vote on whether or not it makes a good continuation of the story-so-far. If the majority votes that it is a good continuation, then the panel stays. If the majority votes that it's not a good continuation, then you have to put the panel back into your hand, and it's still the next person's turn.

  5. First player to get rid of all the cards in their hand wins.

What a wonderfully ludicrous game (and what a sad comment on the state of Nancy... but I digress. Anyway, I thought the game would make a perfect time-waster for the world wide web. So I quickly hacked together a PERL script, sliced up some GIFs, and here we are.

There's only one real difference between this version of the game and the one described above - there are no other players, so you get to call all the shots yourself. (On the other hand, you can mail the URL of your strip to anyone you want to share it with.) You can also draw an entirely new hand whenever you want.

This is an upgraded version of my original web game, complete with over 800 panels taken from more than 75 actual Ernie Bushmiller Sunday strips. A special thanks to The Copacetic Comics Company for having old copies of Nancy and Sluggo and Tip-Top Comics just lying around.

Update 12/01/04: 29 new panels added.
Update 07/02/04: 37 new panels added.
Update 05/06/04: 83 new panels added.
Update 02/29/04: 35 new panels added.
Update 12/19/03: 43 new panels added.
Update 11/10/03: 45 new panels added.
Update 09/01/03: 44 new panels added.
Update 08/01/03: 45 new panels added.
Update 08/26/02: 103 new panels added.
Update 12/14/01: 51 new panels added.
Update 10/02/01: 53 new panels added.

Ready? Then let's play!

Card game concept © 2004 Scott McCloud · script ©2004 Dave "The Knave" White
Nancy is ©2004 United Feature Syndicate (used without permission). Last updated 12/01/04.