Could believe Lady Gaga and the LSAT have something in common?!

I recently had a conversation with a student about what he refers to as “sleeper rules” in games. Sleeper rules are the rules that don’t jive with the rest of the rules. They’re the odd man out, the lone ranger. In a Western, they’d be mavericks. On a playground, they’d be last picked. They’re Lady Gaga in the 2000s and Madonna in the ’80s. They’re the green circle next to the four blue … You get it.

We see sleeper rules all over the places in games, but a really good example is the standalone numbered-ordering rule in a relative ordering game: you are given seven rules, say, and six of them are relative (“X is before Y but after V”). The last one is not. It reads, “V can’t be third.” How many of you have gotten to a rule like this–one that you cannot easily incorporate into your diagram–and decided, I’ll just keep it in my head? Aha! Caught!

My guess is that it’s come back to bite you in the bum, as the ol’ “just keeping it in my head” is known to do in logic games.

While it may be your intuition to just keep it in your head, for most of us the best way to handle sleeper rules is actually to do the opposite. Rules that don’t conform to the expectations of the whole game should generally be treated like royalty. Give them a prominent spot on the page, circle them, underline them, shine a giant spotlight on them–that is, make them graphically obvious, and do so close to your diagram. In the example above, this might mean putting a big slash over “3” underneath the V in your diagram, or a big “V NOT THIRD!” note alongside it.

Obvious, nonconforming rules should be notated in the same way: conspicuously. This is the safest way to handle them.