MYACH and the Fairness Rule

by Crazy Ivan

I finished a game of MYACH against Monk about 20 minutes ago.  I lost A to H, which is pretty good considering the opponent.  I got him with a double leg over, a 4 Myachi columns juggle and a staggered Jedi but ultimately he did me in with a weird combo that includes a high toss, an Iverson and a 2 Myachi gather on the left hand.

As we sat recovering, we started talking about the game and how it had evolved over the years and before we got 2 minutes in I knew that the conversation was going to lead to a blog.

MYACH started as the simplest game in the world.  It was just HORSE with a Myachi.  I do a trick, you match the trick.  If you miss, you get a letter.  If you spell MYACH, you lose.  Simple as that.  There weren't really any rules because the whole idea was that you could do whatever trick you wanted.

Of course, back then there were probably about a dozen people that had ever played a game of MYACH in their lives.  About 99% of games involved at least one Myachi Master and as often as not we pretty much knew who was going to win going in to the games.  We called familiar tricks with a few crazy combos, but it was a pretty predictable game.

Then Myachi started to hit in NYC and everything changed.  All of a sudden there were literally thousands of people playing the game.  This is when the rule book started to swell.

What we found was that a lot of people were kind of taking advantage of the spirit of the game.  It was supposed to be about who was the best at Myachi tricks but a lot of people were looking for ways to "game the system", so to speak.

Example?  Say you're playing against somebody who is double jointed.  They say that their trick is to toss a Myachi up, bend your elbow in a way that would require breaking your arm and then catch it.  They can do it, sure, but nobody else in the world could.  And even if they could, what did it have to do with Myachi skill?

Okay, okay, you want a more realistic example.  How about a kid who is an accomplished gymnast?  He can do all kinds of crazy gymnastic moves.  If he does one of them with a Myachi pinched in his elbow, should that count as a valid Myachi call?  It's not very realistic to expect the opponent to know some crazy gymnastic tumble and it really has very little to do with Myachi.  I can do the splits.  Should I be able to do the splits while doing a Hulk and call that in MYACH?

As the game progressed we discovered that allowing moves like this didn't make for a fun game so we instituted a new rule:

Fairness Rule, Attempt #1: Moves have to be primarily based on Myachi skill.

Now I'll admit that this is far from a perfect rule.  It is open to a lot of interpretation on both sides.  Somebody who isn't very flexible could use that rule to argue that an under the leg is more about flexibility than Myachi skill so it should be stricken from the game.  We all know that Under the Leg is a pretty basic move so that clearly shouldn't be the case.

But we hopes that the spirit of the rule would be clear.  People would see what we were getting at and they would play fair.  And by and large, that's exactly what people did.

Most people, that is.

And then there were the others who would develop long winded explanation of how somehow spinning a basketball on your finger and then setting it down while you do a Wolverine is all about the Myachi skill.  More than that, there were people who would try to invoke this rule any time a move came up that they couldn't do.

In a big way, we'd swapped one problem for an even worse one.  The game was starting to be more about who was the better lawyer than who was the better Myachi player.

So we revised the rule:

Fairness Rule, Attempt #2: Moves that rely on a skill not exemplified by any traditional Myachi move will be exempt from play.

Alright, it's a little wordier, but it was far more specific.  The list of "traditional Myachi moves" was pretty much what was in the DVD.  It made it a bit harder to call totally original tricks, but there were enough moves clearly encompassed by this definition to make games playable without having to enter an Oxford style debate.

But if you'd asked me then where the problem would come from in this iteration of the rule, I'd have said the term "traditional Myachi move" and I'd have been right.

The list of Myachi moves is constantly expanding and since this rule relies on some kind of abstract authority and new move could be challenged under this rule.  That didn't exactly cripple the game or anything, but it did kind of rob it of some of the creativity.

Beyond that, some people were also taking things to the extreme without breaking the rules.  The Super-Yoga is a fine example of that.

This is a move that requires extraordinary flexibility.  It's the kind of move even a naturally flexible person has trouble with and it's something that the majority of people could probably never do with any amount of practice.

Now, this is a trick that clearly relies more on flexibility than Myachi prowess, but doing variations on the Under the Leg is as traditional as a Myachi move gets.  The Yoga, which is a slightly less masochistic version of the same move, had been a common MYACH call for years.

So we made one final go at this whole rule thing.

Fairness Rule, Attempt #3: A MYACH call will be considered valid if the move or all moves within the trick or combo are examples of aerial moves around the Myachi, swaps, upper body stalls, lower body stalls, moves that rely on centrifugal force, moves in which the Myachi crossed over or under a body part, flips and spins of the Myachi, moves in which the Myachi passes through a portal made by the body, moves in which multiple Myachis are manipulated together, strikes and moves in which the Myachi is trapped between two surfaces of the body.


Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it does pretty much say everything we need to say.  It basically describes all  the classes of Myachi tricks and while it doesn't exactly exclude stuff like the Super-Yoga, it does say in no uncertain terms that you can't just keep a Myachi on your hand while you do a kickflip on your skateboard.

But of course, the clever base of players we have were finding way around even this rule.  Besides, it was so longwinded and overbearing that it was hard for everyone to understand.  A lot of the terms within it beg for clarification and the whole thing has sort of a sloppy desperation to it.

We essentially left things there for a really long time, but then new factors arose that really demanded a revision.  MYACH started getting a lot more popular.

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It's becoming clearer and clearer that regional MYACH competitions are coming soon.  Even if Myachi doesn't organize them, they'll show up.  In preparation for that I've been hard at work on the Official Rule Book for the game.  When I first set out to do it, I figured it would be at least kind of easy, but I was horribly mistaken.

Once it's complete, it will be on the "Pages" portion of the blog (over there -->), but I've been pushing back my deadline for it as the task grows larger and larger before me.

The first question, obviously, is how to really tackle that "Fairness Rule" once and for all.  We would need a rule that was unambiguous and didn't rely on any arbitrary interpretation.  It would have to be something we could hand a judge and say, "Here are the rules."

So how to tackle that problem?

We threw a lot of ideas around but none of them really suited the problem.  How could you maintain a nearly infinite potential for tricks but still exclude the ridiculous stuff that has nothing to do with Myachi skill?  It seemed like an impossible question since none of us could clearly define exactly what "Myachi skill" was.

The solution was there, of course, but we all tried to ignore it.  We kept hoping that something easier would eventually come along.  After far too many hours debating it, the choice has become clear.

There must be a database of acceptable tricks.

It will have to be voluminous.  It will have to incorporate every trick ever done with a Myachi and it will have to be constantly revised as new moves are created.  As the game expands a competition committee will have to take over to assess the "Myachi-ness" of each proposed move.

This database will have to be universally available and it'll have to be really easy to search if people are going to use it on the fly.  It would also make an awesome iPhone app.

Rest assured that this database is in the works.  Of course, I've been saying the same thing about the Sackthology for half a decade and you haven't seen that yet so I forgive you if you doubt me.


Do you have an idea on how to solve this Myachi conundrum that doesn't require 190 hours of my life?  You can rest assured that if you do, I'd love to hear it.  Please leave it in the comments section below.