scottmccloud.com - Five Card Nancy

Five Card Nancy is a Dada card game using cut-up panels from Ernie Bushmiller's long-running 20th Century comic strip Nancy. Here are the official rules if you want to make your own deck and try it out. Special thanks to Barry Deutsch whose Usenet post in late ‘98 gave me the jumping off point for the write-up.

Find a reprint book of Nancy comic strips. Photocopy a good portion of the book onto white card-stock (with permission of course), and cut up the copies so that you end up with lots of small rectangles of paper, each containing only one Nancy panel. They should all be the same height. It's a good idea to make a few extra "transition" panels (like a wordless panel of Nancy walking, Nancy smiling, Nancy in silent contemplation, etc...)

Five Card Nancy can be played with three or more people. Place all the panels face down in a pile in the center of the table. Shuffle and deal (or just let everyone pick) five random panels of varying widths for each player. Pick a single panel from the pile and place it face-up on the playing surface, upper left-hand corner. This is Panel One.

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