On the radio show "I'm sorry I haven't a clue" what are the rules to the game "Mornington Crescent"?

Question

On the radio show "I'm sorry I haven't a clue" what are the rules to the game "Mornington Crescent"?

Answer 1

i have no idea but would like to wish you a merry Xmas and all the best for 2008

kindest regards x Kitti x

Answer 2

I can't believe you have listened to it much if you don't know the rules, I prefer to play it without the down treads, as that way you can't take the short cuts for granted, as you may always be blocked if they lead with a follow-up.

Answer 3

I am not sure! But glad to know of sombody who listens to R4.

Answer 4

Mornington Crescent is a parody game created by Geoffrey Perkins and popularised by the BBC Radio 4 programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. A game consists of each player in turn announcing the name of a London landmark or street, most often a station on the London Underground system; the winner is the first player to announce "Mornington Crescent", a tube station on the Northern Line.

The game is intended to satirise complicated strategy games, particularly the abstruse jargon involved in such games as contract bridge or chess.

Players take turns making a "play" or "move", each of which consists of the name of a station on the London Underground, while a chairman (on ISIHAC, Humphrey Lyttelton) officiates. The first player to announce "Mornington Crescent" wins.

Over time the set of permitted destinations has expanded well beyond the stations of the London Underground. Though ISIHAC is recorded in many locations around the United Kingdom, only rarely is the game modified to fit a local map; such cases have included a version in Slough, as well as one in Scotland played during the Edinburgh Fringe arts festival. In one game, recorded in Luton, moves ranged as far afield as the Place de l'Etoile in Paris, Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. A move to Luton High Street, meanwhile, was ruled invalid for being too geographically remote.

A computerised female voice was introduced in one 2005 edition as the Satnav, and later featured twice in 2007 as a computer-player. The computer gets easily distracted, makes comments such as "Have you never played this game before?" and has developed crushes on both Jeremy Hardy and Stephen Fry.

Lyttelton has been known on occasions to state that the game is not in fact based on the London Underground system at all. Instead, he claims that the game was in existence long before the Tube system, and that the Tube (and by association, the entire layout of London) was based upon the game.

Due to the show's cult status it is also played by fans on Usenet and in web forums, and this has increased the mythology surrounding the rules.

[edit]Rules

Those who write in to the show asking for the rules are usually referred to "NF Stovold’s Mornington Crescent: Rules and Origins" and told it is out of print. They are also advised that "your local bookshop might have a copy of The Little Book of Mornington Crescent by Tim, Graeme, Barry and Humph."

This perpetuates the main joke behind Mornington Crescent: that there are actually no rules nor 'game' at all — the game as such is played purely for entertainment value gained by watching others' reactions[2][3]. The covert objective is to give the appearance of a game of great skill and strategy, with detailed and almost absurdly complex and long-winded rules and strategies, in parody of games and sports in which similarly circuitous systems have evolved. This is an open secret, and few if any of the audience are under any illusion otherwise, but it is possible for people to become involved in the game without realising this, and thus to attempt to play the game seriously. In this way, it bears some resemblance to the party games Take a plane, Scissors, and Mao, in which certain players know "secret" rules. Unlike these games, which actually do have specific but secret rules that new players are expected to figure out, the spirit of Mornington Crescent is to maintain the fiction that the rules are well-defined but numerous, and that gameplay is not arbitrary at all.

As Humphrey Lyttelton says: "[the rulebook is maintained with] inimitable accuracy by the lovely Samantha, who sleeps with it under her pillow. As it now runs to 17 volumes, she is running out of pillows." (Samantha is also fictional.)

The following selection of strategy tips by Graeme Garden gives a good indication of the kinds of plausible, esoteric and of course, nonsense "rules" which are propounded:

Boxing out the F, J, O and W placings draws the partner into an elliptical progression north to south.

In weak positional play, it is vital to consolidate an already strong outer square, e.g., Pentonville Road.

In a straight rules game, it's inadmissible to transfer inversely, which is otherwise a powerful tactic.

Opening the triangle will block any of the three possible reverse draws and is usually played early in the game (before the Central Line has been quartered) so that the risk of a diagonal move is negligible, as is the possibility of quartering.

The lateral shift decisively breaks opponents' horizontal and vertical approaches.

The A40 northbound used as a counter-play offers rear access to suburban bidding.

There is some evidence to suggest that in the early days there were a few simple rules which the panellists knew and the audience did not. The fact that the audience did not know the rules was an in-joke for the panel. Since no one would be able to tell the difference, these rules were only loosely followed, and were eventually abandoned altogether. Given that all those intimately connected with the game naturally dissemble about its nature, it is quite hard to pin down what they were, but they may have been based on a 1952 edition of the London A–Z, plus a few basic rules about which pages you could (or could not) turn to from the page you were on. The point of the game was to prevent the opponent turning to the page with Mornington Crescent on it in their next move. [4]

Answer 5

Broadly speaking, the same rules as always. If you want to look upon it as a more sophisticated game, you need to decide which version of the game you are playing. For instance, diagonals can be open or closed.

There are many permutations on the game, but essentially the core rulebook remains the same throughout.

Answer 6

there are no rules