Description

5 Card Nancy has never been published, so all existing sets have been constructed by hand.
The game is essentially an exercise in collaborative storytelling, played with a deck of cards. Each card in the deck features a single, unique panel taken from Ernie Bushmiller's classic newspaper comic-strip "Nancy." The strip is still in syndication today (and currently drawn by Olivia Jaimes), but McCloud insists that only panels from Bushmiller's peak years on the strip -- 1946 and later -- are suitable for use in a 5 Card Nancy deck.

Game play is very simple: an initial card is selected randomly from the draw pile and placed face up on the table. This card will serve as the first panel in the collaborative comic strip that will emerge as a result of gameplay. On her turn, a player will then select a single card from her hand, and place that card face up and to the right of the emerging comic strip. A judge or judges (usually the other players) then vote on the appropriateness of that particular panel to the unfolding narrative. If majority opinion favors the proposed panel, it becomes a part of the strip, otherwise it returns to the hand of the player who proposed it.

5 Card Nancy is a card game invented by cartoonist Scott McCloud, author of "Understanding Comics" and "Reinventing Comics," and creator of the "Zot!" series of comic books (among others). McCloud describes the game as a "Dada" game, by which he means a game in the spirit of the Dada movement.