In the previous thread on hiding numbers, Raph argues that showing the numbers is bad if

[You have] some other sort of game where figuring out the mystery is part of the point…

The king of these games is, arguably, Mao. The game is a crazy-eights clone, with a whole bunch of Uno-style rules, but with the catch being that the players are not told the rules. The dealer makes up his ruleset in his head, and enforces the rules on the fly, forcing players to deduce the ruleset along the way.

Realizing that this is mostly personal preference, I always found Mao to be mostly fun for the dealer. Most of the other players seemed to be pretty frustrated. Shades of ant farming?

On the flip side, I love Magic: the Gathering (my wife bought me a box of Urza’s Legacy for my birthday last month – I love you, babe). In Magic: the Gathering, it is completely common to encounter, along your play cycle, new cards you have never seen before. Some of these cards effectively change the rules of the game entirely. This has a very different feel to me, a very exciting one, like discovering buried treasure. Still, the rules framework is very firm and very tactical, and all of the new cards fit into that understood paradigm somehow.

It may just be that I prefer the sense of discovery to the sense of induction. How about you?