look, the game is simple: low card slaps high card.

everyone has a hand of five cards. every round you put a card face down, and then everyone flips them over at once, and the person who played the lowest card gets to slap the person who played the highest card. when there's a tie, everyone gets some slappage; multi-way ties lead to hilarious combinatorial explosions. all slaps have to be to the cheek, but other than that, creative expression and demonstrations of technical skill are strongly encouraged. got two people to slap? do them simultaneously, one with each hand. three? line them up and get them all with one smooth movement. two people slapping one who fail to attempt a coordinated double-cheek strike show a disgraceful lack of ambition. (judgements of the execution will be more forgiving; such a feat is hard, and stupid, to execute.)

if everyone in a hand plays the same card, everyone slaps everyone. at once, if logistically possible.

this game is called slaphappy, and we played it a lot in high school. i don't remember its genesis, other than that it was homegrown. i believe its primordial origins were in a mississippi trip taken by a couple of my buddies that was so boring that all they could find to amuse themselves was playing lots and lots of cards. even that became so boring that they had to manufacture a reason to care, and the only reason they could think of was "the winner of the game gets to slap the loser of the game." then they realized that the slapping was the fun part.

so someone came up with the rules to slaphappy. despite its idiotic brutality, i believe it persisted because its simple ruleset engendered surprisingly sophisticated strategy: rather than trying to play the lowest card, you're trying to play the highest card that is lower than everyone else's card. this requires card counting and bluffing and long-term thinking, all in a game with literally one rule. the only change we ever made was to eliminate the annoying fact that drawing a king guaranteed you'd get slapped (aces were high), which we considered poor game design. so we decided that kings got to slap aces. this made kings strategic cards, deployable to erase the guaranteed win of holding an ace. everyone was very happy with the change.

slaphappy was dumb. it was so, so, so dumb. but it wasn't just dumb. it was a bonding activity. it was a bona fide card game, with real thought put into its rules. it was an outlet for creative expression.

it was ceremonial chaos. there's nothing more berkeley high than that.