Dick: A Card Game Based on the Novel by Herman Melville Rulebook

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Setup
• Round Play
• Winning a Round and Ending the Game
• Optional Mode: The Little Lower Layer

Setup

1. Like other dick games, this one works best with four or more players.
2. Everyone starts with 12 white cards. All white cards are direct quotations from Moby-Dick.

Round Play

3. For each round, one person serves as Dick Judge. The Dick Judge draws a green card and reads it aloud. The other players submit one white card each as suggested completions for the green card. To prevent dick fraud, the Dick Judge should not know who submitted which card.
4. The Dick Judge reads all the submissions aloud and chooses the best one, construing "best" however he or she sees fit.

Winning a Round and Ending the Game

5. The winner keeps the green card. All players replenish their white cards back to twelve. A new person becomes the Dick Judge and a new round begins.
6. Play until you get bored. At the end of the game, whoever has the most green cards wins. If you care.

Optional Mode: The Little Lower Layer

Or, the Supplementary Dick for Moby-Dick fetishists. Official alternative mode from the publisher's supplementary sheet, headed "Official Dick Holder."

Warning: This alternative mode is a nonstandard, unnatural, and quite possibly blasphemous way to play with your Dick. It requires a clinical-level obsession with Moby-Dick and is not compatible with normal human beings.

Goal. The goal is to arrange the white cards in the order in which they appear in the book. It works with any number of players. To start, place any white card face up on the table.

On your turn.

1. Draw a white card from the deck and place it in the Dick Holder so that you can see the text but not the chapter name and number. Or just cover up the chapter name and number with your thumb.
2. Point to where the card should go in the sequence of cards that have already been played.
3. Check the card to find out if you were right. If you were right, the card goes on the table in the right order. If you were wrong, you keep the card.

Play passes to the next player after each card.

Scoring (optional). If you want to keep score, players are "out" once they have accumulated five cards, i.e., once they have been wrong five times.

Note. The publisher recommends considering the answer correct as long as it puts the chapters in the right order. If you want to get granular about whether "putting your hand into the tar-pot" falls before or after "a bloody battle in Affghanistan" in Chapter 1, you can search the text of Moby-Dick at text.whysoever.com.